Why is sent mail more useful than inbox?

Sent mail is a first-person writing corpus — every email is something you actually wrote. Inbox is other people's writing, addressed to you. For voice signal and self-context, only the outgoing side matters.

What about the newsletters I want to keep?

For newsletters, forward the ones you care about to your Vault Inbox — that gives you the full email as an artifact without importing your entire inbox. Or wait for the RSS feeds when the publisher supports them.

Doesn't inbox tell you what topics people write to me about?

It does, but it's noisy — most inbox volume is transactional, promotional, or automated. The signal-to-noise ratio in sent mail is much higher, and the signal is more clearly you.

When will Gmail import be live?

Pending Google OAuth verification. The scope we request is read-only, limited to sent mail — no inbox, no drafts, no attachments in the initial version. Join the waitlist to be pinged when it ships.

A design decision · ~5 min read

Gmail Sent-Only vs Full Inbox

The obvious answer is "import everything." The right answer is "import only what you wrote." Here's why the smaller Gmail import is the more useful one — and the safer one.

Two very different corpora

Your Gmail account contains two very different kinds of text. The sent folder is a first-person writing corpus — every email in it is something you wrote, addressed to a specific person, with tone and intent shaped by that relationship. The inbox is other people's writing, plus a much larger volume of transactional, promotional, and automated messages.

For a memory tool trying to help a Konshus speak like you, the two are not comparable. One is the voice signal. The other is noise.

What sent mail reveals

How you write to different people — the version of you that emails your sister vs your CFO. Tone-shift patterns are strong identity signal.
What you actually explain — the topics you find yourself typing out repeatedly are the topics you care about.
Decisions you told someone about — most life-changing decisions get announced by email long before they get journaled.
Recurring commitments — the six-month-old thread where you said "yes, I'll be there" is often the reason next month's calendar looks the way it does.

Distillation across a few thousand sent emails produces atoms about how you communicate, what you care about, and who you show up for. Inbox produces atoms about what marketers want your attention on.

Never lose your AI again

Konshus is one way to solve this — a persistent memory vault and portable persona that follows you across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and whatever ships next.

Meet Konshus

Privacy also gets easier

Sent-only is a smaller OAuth scope. Google's verification review is faster and stricter when the requested access is proportionate to the feature. "We read your sent folder to build a personal writing corpus" is a specific, defensible ask. "We read your entire inbox" isn't — and shouldn't be.

Your inbox contains other people's private writing addressed to you. Feeding it to a memory tool is a consent question they never got to answer. Sent mail is you writing about yourself; the consent situation is much cleaner.

If you want specific inbox items

One escape hatch for the newsletters, receipts, or specific threads you do want in memory:

Forward to your Vault Inbox — the forwarded email becomes an artifact. Perfect for the one great newsletter or a specific meaningful thread.

Getting started

Gmail (sent-only) is pending Google OAuth verification. Join the waitlist at /vault/import/gmail. When verification completes, the connection asks for the narrow scope and imports historical sent mail plus new messages going forward.

Frequently asked

Frequently Asked Questions

Import only what you wrote

Sent mail is voice signal. Inbox is noise. The smaller Gmail import is the more useful one — and the safer one.

Meet Konshus