Email lets your employee hold a real mailbox conversation: reading what comes in, replying, drafting, and sending on a schedule you approve.
Connecting
Section titled “Connecting”There are two ways to connect an email channel:
- Gmail (Google sign-in): authorize with your Google account. CruzClaw requests a least-privilege scope (read, send, drafts, and label/archive). It never asks for permanent delete or mailbox settings access.
- Any other email (IMAP/SMTP): enter the IMAP host, SMTP host, and the address the employee sends from, plus the mailbox credentials. These are stored encrypted, never in the channel configuration or any config file.
When you connect a Gmail mailbox you also choose whether the mailbox is your own or a separate employee mailbox. If it is your own mailbox, the employee’s drafts are written to its Drafts folder so you can review them where you already look. Employee mailboxes without that review surface route prepared messages through the approval flow instead.
What your employee does
Section titled “What your employee does”- Receives inbound mail by polling the mailbox over IMAP and works each message as a task.
- Sends replies and new emails. Every send is screened by the send gate first.
- Schedules emails for later with
cruzclaw_email_schedule. A scheduled email waits for your approval first; once approved, it is sent automatically at the requested time without you needing to be present.
A special behavior: unknown correspondents
Section titled “A special behavior: unknown correspondents”Email correspondents come and go, and you cannot register every one of them as a contact in advance. So when the employee tries to send to an address with no contact record at all, the message is not blocked; it is queued for you as an approval of the exact recipients, subject, and body. Approve it and it goes out; reject it and it does not.
Email is not a command surface
Section titled “Email is not a command surface”Slash commands are never processed from email. Email is for correspondence: anything you would direct with /approve, /ask, or /do must come from the dashboard chat or Slack. See the channels overview for the full command-surface matrix.
Last verified: 2026-10-24 against the shipped codebase.