Module 4 — Communication · Lesson 4.2
The Email Inbox
Connecting Gmail, Outlook or ProtonMail, reading and composing, and what changes once mail is in
~11 min
What you'll learn
- Connect a mail provider and switch between connected mailboxes
- Read, reply and compose from inside Kavanah
- Explain what the agent can and cannot do with mail once it is connected
- Avoid the duplicate-mail trap of connecting two paths to the same mailbox
Email is where most commitments to people outside your team get made, which is why a work system that cannot see it is always guessing. Connecting a mailbox takes two minutes and changes what the agent can do more than any other single integration except the calendar.
Connecting a mailbox
Go to Settings → Integrations and find your provider's card. Gmail and Outlook / Microsoft 365 are OAuth: click Connect and complete the flow. ProtonMail connects through Bridge.
The connection is per workspace. Connecting Gmail in one workspace does not connect it in another, because the credential is stored against that workspace's membership. This surprises people who belong to several and is not a bug.
Once connected, Email Inbox under the Inbox group has provider tabs. Switch between Gmail, ProtonMail and Outlook if you have more than one connected.
Working the inbox
Open a message to read it. Reply or compose with the Compose dialog. It is a working mail client rather than a read-only preview — the point is that you do not have to leave to answer.
What it is not is a replacement for your mail client's full feature set. Treat it as the surface for handling mail that is about work already in Kavanah: you read the message, you reply, and the task or the client record is one click away rather than in another tab.
The workflow that pays for the connection is: mail arrives, you turn it into a task, you reply saying what will happen. All three steps in one surface.
What the agent can do once mail is connected
This is the real reason to connect. With a mailbox connected, the agent can search your mail, read a thread, summarize it, draft a reply, and — with governance — send.
The governance matters and is Module 8's subject, but the short version belongs here because it shapes what you should expect. Sending email is an external send: it leaves the building and cannot be undone. By default that category is parked for explicit per-action approval rather than executed. So 'draft a reply to this and let me look at it' is the normal shape of the interaction, and it works even at conservative autonomy settings.
One related behaviour worth knowing: when you ask the agent to schedule something — 'email them Monday at 9am' — the time is interpreted in YOUR timezone, taken from your profile. Give it a naked local time and let it do the resolution; do not do offset arithmetic yourself.
The duplicate-mail trap
Kavanah can reach some mailboxes by more than one route. Most notably, if you connect both a native Google integration and a provider that proxies Google on your behalf, you can end up with two paths to the same account.
For mail, Kavanah resolves to a single backend, so the inbox does not double. For calendars, events are de-duplicated at render.
Still, the clean answer is not to set up two paths to the same mailbox in the first place. If you are connecting a proxy provider that offers Gmail access, decide whether you want native Google or the proxy and connect one of them. It makes every subsequent debugging conversation shorter.
Connect and use it
- 1
Settings → Integrations. Gmail and Outlook are OAuth; ProtonMail goes through Bridge. Remember the connection is per workspace.
- 2
Read and reply to one thread from inside Kavanah
Open the Email Inbox, pick a live thread, and answer it here rather than switching tabs.
- 3
Turn one email into a task and reply saying so
This is the loop the connection exists for: mail in, task created, commitment answered.
- 4
Ask the agent to draft a reply
Then read what it produced. Drafting works at conservative settings; sending is an external send and parks for approval.
What to watch
- Connection health
- Whether the mail integration is still connected and syncing, rather than silently expired.
- Healthy signal: Connected. An expired grant looks like a quiet inbox, which is why you check the connection rather than the message count.
- Mail-to-task conversion
- How often an email that contains a commitment becomes a task rather than staying in the inbox.
- Healthy signal: Routinely. Commitments that live only in a mailbox are the ones that get dropped.
Key takeaways
- ·Mail connects per workspace, under Settings → Integrations; Gmail and Outlook via OAuth, ProtonMail via Bridge.
- ·The inbox is for handling mail about work that lives in Kavanah — read, reply, and turn it into a task in one place.
- ·Connecting mail is what lets the agent search, summarize and draft; sending is governed as an external send.
- ·Give the agent naked local times — it resolves them in your profile timezone.
- ·Do not connect two paths to the same mailbox; pick native or proxy and stay with it.
Next: the calendar — the other integration that changes the agent most, and the one that makes capacity mean anything.