Connecting a mailbox

Two ways in: Gmail, and any IMAP mailbox.

Gmail

Authorize through Google. You are sent to Google, you approve, you come back. Steerd never sees your Google password.

IMAP

For everything else: your own mail server, a hosting provider, a mailbox that is not Google. You provide the server, the port and credentials, and you pick the folder to read.

Use an app password where your provider offers one. It is revocable on its own, so removing Steerd's access later does not mean changing the password you use everywhere.

What Steerd reads and keeps

Steerd keeps a copy of the messages it reads, so the inbox can show conversations without going back to your mail server every time you click. That copy lives in your team's data:

• Sender, recipients, subject, date and a short preview are stored as ordinary fields.
• The message body is encrypted with your team's own key. See Your data.
• Of attachments, only whether the message had any is recorded. Their names and contents are not copied out of your mailbox.

How much it takes on connect depends on the provider. Gmail pulls in the 100 most recent messages, so the inbox has something in it immediately. An IMAP mailbox is read from the beginning of the folder you chose, in batches, so a long-lived folder arrives over several rounds rather than all at once.

After that, Check for new mail on the inbox fetches what has arrived since.

When Steerd writes to your mailbox

Reading never changes anything: no message is deleted, moved, marked read or refiled by Steerd.

Sending does write, and only in one place. If you set your mailbox up for replying, then each reply you send is filed as a copy in your Sent folder, which is what your own mail client does too. On Gmail this happens on Google's side automatically. On IMAP, Steerd puts the copy in the Sent folder you picked when you set sending up.

Nothing leaves your mailbox unless you press Send.

Setting up sending on IMAP also widens what is read. Steerd starts reading that Sent folder too, from the beginning, which means the mail you sent before you ever used Steerd is copied into the store alongside the incoming side. It has to look there to tell whether a reply of its own really went out. If that is more than you want stored, do not configure sending on that mailbox.

More than one

You can connect several mailboxes, which is the normal case when inquiries arrive at both a personal and a shared address. Conversations from all of them land in the same inbox, and each one is answered from the mailbox it arrived at.

Disconnecting

Remove the connection under Settings, Integrations and Steerd stops reading that mailbox immediately.

What it kept is then cleaned up, and what survives is narrower than people expect: conversations attached to a project, messages you turned into a project, and the replies you sent. Incoming messages in a thread you answered are not kept by the reply alone. See When a mailbox disconnects.