Email

What this is

The Email section is a real mail client backed by your Gmail mailbox. Genosyn imports your whole mailbox into a local index and keeps it in step with Gmail in both directions: mail that arrives in Gmail shows up here within about a minute, and anything you do here — read, star, archive, label, draft, send, forward — is written straight back to Gmail. The goal is that you never need to open Gmail to work your inbox; read it there or here, act on it here, and neither drifts.

Connecting a mailbox

Email rides on the existing Google integration, so a mailbox is one Google connection that granted the Gmail product at consent time.

1. Open Settings → Integrations and add (or reconnect) a Google connection. On Google's consent screen, tick the Gmail product so the connection carries the Gmail scope.
2. Open Email from the section menu and pick that connection. Genosyn reads the account address and starts the first sync in the background.
3. The first sync imports your entire mailbox, newest first, so everything is searchable here. A big account fills in over a few minutes in the background (the sidebar shows the running count); after that, sync is incremental. You can connect more than one mailbox and switch between them from the account picker at the top of the sidebar.

Reading and answering mail

The folder rail carries the usual views — Inbox, Starred, Sent, Drafts, All mail, Spam, Trash — plus your Gmail labels. Open a thread to read it, then Reply, Reply all, Forward, or Compose a new message — with file attachments if you need them. Star, archive, trash, mark read/unread, and apply labels all act on the whole thread and land in Gmail immediately. The search box matches subjects, participants, and the full text of every message in the index, not just what's visible in the list.

Message bodies are rendered safely — scripts are stripped and remote images stay blocked behind a Show images click, so a tracking pixel can't phone home just because you opened a message.

Handing a thread to an AI employee

Open any thread and click Hand to AI. Pick an employee, write a short instruction, and choose what it should do:

• Draft a reply. The employee writes a reply as a Gmail draft on the thread. Nothing is sent — you review the draft and press Send when it is right. This is the default and the safe way to put AI on your inbox.
• Reply directly. The employee composes and sends the reply itself. Only offered to employees you trust with send access.
• Triage. No writing — the employee reads the thread and files it: applies a label, archives, stars, or marks it read.

The handover runs the employee with its full Soul, Skills, and memory, and its progress and result show up right on the thread and on the AI handovers page. You get a notification when it finishes.

Giving AI employees mailbox access

Under Email → Settings → AI access, grant the employees who should be able to act on the mailbox, at one of three levels:

• Read. Browse and search threads and labels — no changes.
• Draft. Also write drafts, apply labels, archive, star, and mark read. The default: an employee can triage the inbox and put a finished reply in the thread, but a human still sends it.
• Send. Also send mail on the account's behalf. Reserve this for employees trusted to speak for the company unattended.

The level covers every route an employee has to the mailbox, not just the mail tools. The Google connector exposes its own gmail_* tools on the same account, and once you connect a mailbox here those tools answer to the level you set — an employee on Draft is refused a send whichever tool it reaches for. An employee you never granted is refused outright, even if it holds a grant on the underlying Google Connection.

Rules — automating the inbox

A rule runs on every new message that arrives: when an email matches these conditions, do these actions. Conditions match on sender, recipient, subject, body text, and whether there's an attachment. Actions can apply a label, mark read, star, archive — and, the headline feature, hand the thread to an AI employee with an instruction and a mode.

That is how you wire up “when a support email comes in, ask an AI employee to categorize it and draft a first response”: one rule, condition to contains support@, action hand to employee in draft mode. Every rule that matches fires, so labelling and handing off compose naturally.

Rules vs. Routines

Rules are reactive — they fire when mail arrives. For scheduled email work (“every morning, summarize yesterday's unread support threads”), give an employee a Routine instead: a granted employee can search, read, draft, and send through the same mailbox from any routine, no new machinery required.

What employees can do with mail

Granted employees get a mail tool on the built-in genosyn MCP surface, with operations to list accounts, search and read threads, write drafts, triage (label / archive / mark read), and — with send access — send. Search runs over the same full-text index humans use and takes structured filters (sender, recipient, date range, label, has-attachment), so an employee can answer “what did the vendor say about pricing last quarter?” without a human forwarding anything. Every action an employee takes is checked against its grant level and recorded in the audit log and the employee's journal, so you can always see what it did after the fact.