It opens every message, reads the attachments, follows a link when that's what the answer needs, then files it where it belongs. Early on it asks you about everything; it earns its independence one pigeonhole at a time.
Works with the mail you already have: IMAP, POP3, SMTP.
On each pass over your mailbox, the apprentice picks up what arrived and applies the instructions you wrote. Here is what it does, in the order it does it.
A pigeonhole is a real folder in your mail account, not an in-house tag, so it shows up on your phone too. The apprentice states how sure it is (sure, hesitant, no idea) and only 'sure' moves anything. Any filing can be undone for seven days.
'Is the quote signed?', 'are the bank details attached?'. It answers point by point with yes, no or not sure, and quotes the evidence it used. The overall verdict is then computed by the code from those answers.
A complete quote lands in 'To sign', an incomplete file in 'Waiting on documents'. Three hops per message at most, never the same pigeonhole twice, and the inbox is a terminus.
The body of that message is written in advance; the apprentice only writes one clause, the one about what actually arrived. One write per person per week, never at night or on weekends, and nothing goes out if you already replied yourself.
You tick the sources you allow, pigeonhole by pigeonhole. Anything unticked is never opened.
PDF, Word, Excel, images, plain text. A scanned PDF gets rendered to images so it can still be read, ten pages at most. Archives (zip, rar, 7z) are never opened.
Three per message at most, and the code picks them, never the model. Action links (unsubscribe, sign-in, password reset) are ruled out by default, and so are tracking hosts.
One search per message, off unless you turn it on. The query is built from the sender's domain and a handful of checked markers: an IBAN whose checksum adds up, a card number that passes Luhn. The model itself gets no browser.
A reply inherits the conversation's pigeonhole, and the 'always here' or 'never here' rules you pin on a sender win over any analysis. Those decisions are free: they cost no model call at all.
These live in the code rather than in a policy page. No setting turns them off.
A mailbox starts in Watching: the apprentice writes down what it would have done and touches nothing. You switch to Active once its calls look right, and one button stops everything. An instruction only acts alone after ten approvals in a row that you did not edit.
It looks and takes notes. Nothing moves in the mailbox.
It files, checks, and hands you whatever it is unsure about.
Everything stops. An abnormal error rate trips this by itself.
Thirty-six providers come preconfigured: Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Zoho, Yahoo and the rest: type the address and the servers fill themselves in. Nothing to migrate, no address to change. The apprentice works inside the mailbox your clients already write to.
The product is nearly there. Tell us which part of your mail eats the most time. That is what decides what we build next.
