Earned Trust and Auto-Approval

Trust is earned, narrow, and losable

By default, everything your helper wants to send goes through your review. Over time, one specific kind of work can earn a shortcut: routine email replies in a thread you have repeatedly approved. The shortcut is always offered by BrainRoad, always accepted by you, always scoped to a single email thread, and always revocable.

How a trust offer happens

BrainRoad watches your own review history on the server side and offers trust only when a thread has earned it:

• You (the account owner) have approved at least 3 outbound replies in the same genuine customer email thread.
• Your most recent approval went out at least 50% as drafted. If you had to heavily rewrite the helper’s draft, no offer appears.
• The thread is real customer correspondence. Welcome, demo, and test threads can never earn trust.

When those conditions are met, a trust offer card appears in your Inbox, titled along the lines of “Auto-handle routine replies to [that person]?” Approving the offer creates the rule; declining it means nothing changes. The offer itself is never auto-approved.

Two things worth stating plainly:

• The helper cannot ask for its own autonomy. Offers are mined by the platform from your approval history. A proposal from the helper (or from anything outside BrainRoad) to widen its own authority is refused by design.
• Scope is one email thread. A rule covers replies in that specific thread only. There is no way to trust an entire sender or domain, and no account-wide trust from a thread rule.

The rails on every unattended send

Even inside a trusted thread, every automatic send passes hard checks:

• Recipients are pinned. An unattended reply can only go to people already verified in that thread (from the original inbound emails and your previously approved sends). Any new address, including a new Cc or Bcc, causes the send to fall back to your review.
• High-stakes messages stay manual. Every message is screened for financial terms, large amounts, legal or commitment language, and credential or security content. Any hit sends the draft back to your Inbox instead. The dashboard puts it this way: high-stakes messages (money, contracts, credentials) still come back to you, and every send is logged.
• A daily cap applies. Each rule has a daily budget (5 sends per day by default). Once it is used up, further replies wait for you.

Auto-approved items do not disappear: they show up in the Inbox Recent tab with an “Auto-approved” badge, and the send is recorded in your account history.

Trust is losable

If you decline a reply in a trusted thread, or an unattended send fails, the thread’s rule is paused immediately and everything goes back to manual review until you re-grant it.

Managing trusted threads

Open Inbox → Settings → “Earned autonomy · trusted threads.” Each rule shows who the replies go to and whether it is Active or Paused, with Pause, Resume, and Revoke buttons. Only the account owner can see or change these; an invited teammate reviewer cannot.

Broader auto-approval policies (optional)

The same Settings tab also has account-wide policies, all off by default:

• Brain notes: a toggle to auto-approve the helper’s notes into the Business Brain, with an editable daily limit. This is the low-risk one.
• Email replies (all threads): a global auto-send mode that requires typing an exact confirmation phrase to enable, plus a positive daily limit. The dashboard is blunt about it: this is the only mode that puts traffic in front of a recipient without you, and it is rare on purpose. Even with it on, the high-stakes screen and recipient pinning still apply to every send.
• Connectors: per-connector Allow / Ask / Block rules with daily limits for registered read-only external APIs. Without an Allow rule, every call lands in your Inbox.

Quotes, bookings, and text messages have no auto-approval option at all. They always face you.