Mail is the place where an assistant is most useful and most dangerous, and the two facts are the same fact. So the line between reading and acting is drawn hard, and it is drawn by you.
All of it, including the mail you were never going to open. What arrives at three in the morning has been read by the time you are up, and what is in it is already part of what it knows about the project it belongs to.
Not a folder and not a label. A short account of what actually needs you today and why, in the order it would deal with them. The rest is still there, and it stopped being your problem.
Written with everything it already knows about the person, the project and what was agreed last time, because it has the whole history rather than the last message in the thread.
The routine ones, the ones you have told it it can handle, go without you. Anything with consequences comes back first. Which is which is your call, and you can change it whenever you like.
Search finds a message when you already know what to look for. Most of the time the thing you need is a fact that was mentioned once, in an attachment, in a thread you only half remember being on.
It reads across the whole archive, opens what looks relevant, compares this year against last, and answers the question you asked rather than handing you eleven results to read yourself.
The answer goes into the same memory as everything else, so the next time that renewal comes up it does not start from the inbox again. Mail is one of the ways it comes to know your life, not a separate application it visits.
We think so too. It is worth saying plainly where the mail sits once Maison is reading it, because the answer is the reason this runs on your machine rather than ours.
Maison runs on the Mac in front of you and reaches your mail from there, the way any mail client on your computer does. There is no copy of your mailbox on a server of ours.
The memory is a database on your own drive, in files you can read, copy, back up or delete. If you walk away from Maison, it is still there and it is still yours.
Not on your mail, not on your files, not on your conversations. By default none of your conversations are stored on our servers at all.
Maison reads everything that arrives, tells you what actually needs you and why, and drafts the replies that need writing. It sends the routine mail you have explicitly told it it can send, and anything with consequences comes back to you before it goes anywhere.
By knowing the rest of your situation rather than by scoring the message. It has the history of the project, the person and what was agreed last time, so it can tell the difference between a note that mentions a deadline and the one that moves it.
You tell it, and you can change it whenever you like. The line sits wherever you draw it: some people let it handle scheduling and acknowledgments from the first week and keep everything else waiting as a draft. Nothing with consequences crosses that line on its own.
No. Maison runs on the Mac in front of you and reaches your mail from there, the way any mail client on your computer does. There is no copy of your mailbox on a server of ours, and none of it is used to train anything.
That is one of the things it is best at. You can ask for a fact rather than a message, including one that was only ever in an attachment, and it reads across the archive, opens what looks relevant and answers the question instead of handing you a list of results.
It has been read by the time you are up, and what is in it is already part of what Maison knows about the project it belongs to. What you get in the morning is the short account of what needs you, not four hundred unread messages.