Email Watch

Goal: Choose which mailboxes and folders a watch reads, from a mail account you already connected.

An Email Watch is a node on the canvas. It reads chosen folders of the mailboxes of one mail account, and the messages it keeps go to one data connection, drawn as a feeds line from the watch to the connection.

Before you start

• A provisioned private landing zone, and a mail account connected in Communications whose kind reads mail: Microsoft 365, Personal Gmail or IMAP mailbox. An SMTP relay only sends, so a watch cannot read it. Google Workspace cannot be connected yet, so it is not offered either.
• Until the workspace holds such an account, the Node Bank has no Email Watch.

The inspector

Click a watch on the canvas to open its inspector. It opens on its first tab, and has five:

Tab	Holds
Account and Mailboxes	Which account the watch reads, its mailboxes and their folders
Filters	The rules that decide which messages are kept
Mode	Keep what the rules match, or keep every message
Features	Acknowledge, write-back, manual ingest and bounces
Status	The watch's checks, the same ones Commit Changes runs

This page covers the first tab.

Account and Mailboxes

Account and Mailboxes is the tab the inspector opens on.

The account

The Mail account drop-down ("Mail account") lists every account in the workspace whose kind reads mail, sorted by name. Each option is the account's name and its kind, as the Mail accounts list shows them, for example Intake · Microsoft 365. A watch with no account chosen yet starts on "Choose an account", and under the drop-down says "No mailbox chosen."

Choosing a different account clears the mailboxes chosen for the one before, because a mailbox belongs to one account.

When the workspace holds no account that reads mail (for example after the last one was removed), the tab has no drop-down. It says: "Connect a mail account in Environment, then Communications, first."

An account of a kind this tab has no picker for says "This account kind cannot be watched yet."

Mailboxes on a Microsoft 365 account

One Microsoft 365 account can read many mailboxes, so the tab finds them as you type. The Mailboxes box ("Mailboxes") reads "Type a name or an address", and before you type it says "Type a name or an address to find a mailbox."

A short pause after your last key, the tab asks Microsoft 365 for the mailboxes that match. Only the answer to what you typed last is shown, so a slow earlier answer never replaces a later one. Each match reads its display name and its address; a mailbox with no display name reads Mailbox and the first eight characters of its id. You can choose more than one.

What you type is not sent when the tab can already tell it would be refused. Instead it says why:

You typed	The tab says
One character	"Type at least two characters of a name or an address."
More than 64 characters	"Type 64 characters or fewer."
A quotation mark or a backslash	"Leave out quotation marks and backslashes."

A search that fails is one sentence, never an empty list. It starts Could not list mailboxes: with the server's reason, and adds what that reason means when it is one of these:

• "OpenX Mail has not been given permission to look people up in your directory."
• "No person has that address. A group or shared mailbox is not found by search."

A search that worked and found nobody says No mailbox matches '...' with what you typed. When some matches are mailboxes OpenX Mail cannot read, the tab counts them, for example "1 match is outside what OpenX Mail can read." See Connect a Microsoft 365 Mailbox for what OpenX Mail can read.

The mailbox on a Personal Gmail or IMAP account

These accounts sign in as one mailbox, so the tab shows that mailbox, Mailbox: and its address, already chosen. There is nothing to type. An account that holds no mailbox address yet says: "This account has no mailbox address yet. Finish connecting it in Environment, then Communications."

Folders

Each chosen mailbox has its own Folders box under the mailboxes (on Microsoft 365, Folders in and the mailbox's address). While the folders load it says "Listing folders…"; the box reads "Find a folder" and filters the list as you type. You can choose more than one.

• A mailbox you add starts with its Inbox chosen.
• A folder you chose earlier stays chosen even when the mailbox no longer lists it.
• A listing that fails is one sentence, Could not list folders: and the server's reason, never an empty list. A mailbox that lists nothing says "This mailbox lists no folders."

What an AI sees of recent mail

To help write a watch's rules, a person's AI can read the newest messages of one watch's folders through retrieve_inventory: each message's sender domain only, its subject masked, and whether the watch's rules would keep it. No body, attachment, recipient or id ever reaches the AI. See Working with Thinky for how Thinky reads your workspace.

The guide says how the subject is masked: "The mask writes [address]@domain for an address, [phone], [card], [id] and [account] for those numbers, and [name] for every capitalised word but the first; a name written in lowercase is not masked."