Email

The assistant can have its own mailbox. Once connected, it reads mail sent there and can answer it, using the same memory, the same tools and the same approvals as every other conversation you have with it. Nothing about email is a separate assistant with different rules; it is one more door into the same one.

What a mailbox is for

A mailbox lets other people, and other services, reach the assistant without opening the app. Someone can email it a question and get an answer back. A service you already use can send it a notice and let it decide what, if anything, to do about it. You can email it yourself from your phone when you are away from your desk, and it treats that exactly as if you had typed it in the app.

Every sender is labeled before the assistant reads a word

The moment mail arrives, before any of it reaches the assistant, the app decides who it is from. That decision is made in code, from your own settings and from the mail server’s own proof of where a message really came from, not from anything the message itself claims. There are four labels, and each one changes what a reply is allowed to do on its own:

• You. Mail from the address you told the app is yours, that also passes the mail server’s own check that it really came from there, is treated exactly like typing the same words into the app. It can start work with no extra confirmation, the same as any other message from you.
• Someone you have trusted. An address you have specifically approved can hold a conversation and get real answers, but anything it asks for that would change something, send something onward, or spend anything is still confirmed with you first.
• A new contact. An address the assistant has not seen approved for trust yet can still get a reply, but every reply is written as if a stranger were reading it, and the assistant may suggest adding the sender to your trusted list. Only you can actually add one; the assistant can only ask.
• Unknown or unverifiable. Mail that fails the server’s proof of origin, or comes from an address nothing recognizes and nothing has approved, never reaches the assistant as a conversation at all.

Whatever a message asks for, in whatever words, cannot move it into a more trusted label. Only you can do that, from the app.

Approvals still come to you, wherever you answer from

A question that needs your yes or no does not get answered inside the email thread. It surfaces the same way any other confirmation does, on whichever surface you have open, and you answer it there. If you are away and a mail conversation is waiting on you, it waits; nothing about email makes an approval more automatic than it already is anywhere else.

You are also copied on any mail the assistant sends to someone other than you, so a conversation it is having on your behalf is never happening where you cannot see it.

Connecting a mailbox

The mailbox password is added in the same place every other password on this machine goes: Settings, Credentials. Add an account there, pick “Add a mailbox”, choose your mail provider from the list, and type the mailbox address and an app password for it (most providers ask you to make one specifically for this, separate from your normal sign-in password; the form links to the right page for whichever provider you picked). The provider decides the rest: which servers the account may reach, and what the row is called.

Then open Channels and choose the email room. Nothing there asks for a password. Instead, pick:

• the provider, so the door knows which servers to use,
• the mailbox credential you just added, from a list, never typed again,
• the assistant’s own mailbox address,
• your own address, so the assistant knows which incoming mail is you.

A test button signs in with the stored credential and tells you plainly if something is wrong, before anything else is saved. Once it works, connecting points the door at that mailbox and turns it on. Nothing here needs a file to be edited by hand, and nothing is shared with anyone else’s install: the mailbox you connect is yours alone.

Turning the door back off, or connecting a different mailbox, works the same way, from the same room. Reconnecting with the same credential never adds a second copy of it; add a new one in Credentials only when it is genuinely a different mailbox.