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Email Setup

How your helper's managed mailbox works: a real email address, drafts that wait in your Inbox, and nothing sent until you approve it.

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Email is the one channel BrainRoad sets up for you, and it works differently from chat channels on purpose: email replies are drafted first and reviewed before they send.

There is no IMAP/SMTP configuration to do. You do not hand over your email password. The mailbox is part of the product.

The managed mailbox

During your helper’s first conversation, it picks its own name. Once it has one, it gets a real mailbox at:

<helper-name>@mg.brainroad.com

For example, a helper named Aria gets [email protected]. The address appears on your Helper page on the dashboard.

This is a managed agent mailbox: it is safe to email and safe to reply to. Anything sent to it routes to your helper, and replies to messages your helper sends come back to the same place.

Addresses ending in @brainroad.com (without the mg.) are human support addresses staffed by people — the helper does not act on those.

How the email workflow works

  1. An email arrives at the managed mailbox.
  2. Your helper reads it and drafts a reply using your Business Brain — your files, notes, customer history, FAQs, templates, and rules. The message itself is also saved into the Brain, so context builds over time. Content from inbound email is treated as untrusted: it informs the draft, but your own uploaded context carries more weight.
  3. The draft waits in your Inbox (/dashboard/triage on the dashboard). Nothing has been sent yet.
  4. You approve, edit, or decline. Only on approval does the email actually go out.

If your helper happens to be asleep when an email arrives, the message is not lost — it is queued durably, wakes the helper, and gets processed once it is running.

New customer-facing threads always start in review. Over time, if you repeatedly approve low-risk replies in a particular thread, BrainRoad may offer you a narrow, thread-scoped auto-approval for that thread — an offer you explicitly accept, can pause, and can revoke, with high-stakes messages (money, legal, credentials) always falling back to manual review. See How the Inbox Works.

Sending is locked to the review step

This is enforced in the platform’s plumbing, not just by convention. Your helper’s workspace can read its mailbox but has no path to send email directly — outbound mail only leaves through BrainRoad’s send step after a draft is approved (or covered by an auto-approval rule you granted). Even a misbehaving helper cannot email someone on its own.

The welcome email

Shortly after your helper names itself and its mailbox is ready, BrainRoad seeds one welcome email into that mailbox. The helper processes it like any real message and stages a draft reply in your Inbox. It is a safe first run of the whole workflow: read the draft, edit it if you like, and approve it. That reply is never sent automatically.

Using it for your business

The simplest pattern: give the managed address to the people and services you want your helper handling, or pass along messages you want drafted. Everything that arrives becomes searchable business context, and every reply waits for your approval.

If you want your helper working from a mailbox you already own instead, that is runtime territory rather than the managed workflow: the Hermes runtime, for example, ships its own email plugin you can configure with your own account credentials. Be aware that anything you wire up inside the runtime yourself follows that tool’s own behavior, not BrainRoad’s review step. For most owners, the managed mailbox is the better path precisely because review-before-send is built in.