What happens after you connect

The moment a mailbox connects, two things happen: a one-time look back, then a continuous flow.

The one-time import — you choose how much

When you add a mailbox, the form asks how much history to import: none at all, the last 24 hours, the last 7 days (the default), or the last 30 days. The import runs once, at first connect, newest first, and is capped at 200 messages whatever you choose. Older mail than your choice is never imported; a busy, long-lived inbox shows your chosen window in Inbox activity, not the whole archive.

Choosing None means InboxAgent starts clean: nothing historical is read, and only mail that arrives after you connect is processed. That’s the right choice if you don’t want past correspondence turning into records in your CRM or helpdesk.

The continuous flow

From then on, InboxAgent checks the mailbox for new mail about once a minute and processes whatever arrived. Each email flows through classification and gets its outcome — lead, ticket, review, or ignore (see How an email travels through InboxAgent).

A few useful guarantees:

• Nothing is skipped because of a hiccup. InboxAgent tracks “processed up to here” per mailbox and only moves that marker forward when a message has been processed successfully — a temporary failure means the message is retried, not lost.
• Duplicates collapse. The same email seen twice is never processed twice.
• Your mailbox is untouched. InboxAgent reads; it never marks mail as read (Microsoft), moves, labels, or deletes anything. What your team sees in Outlook or Gmail is exactly what they’d see without InboxAgent.

One Gmail-specific caveat: Gmail pickup depends on messages being unread and in the Inbox at check time. See Connect a Gmail mailbox.

Where to watch it working

• Dashboard — totals tick up as mail is processed; recent activity shows the latest ten.
• Inbox activity — the full list, with category, confidence, and outcome per email.
• System logs — the per-email audit trail when you want the complete story of one message.

Pausing a mailbox

Need to stop processing temporarily (say, during a migration)? Edit the mailbox and untick Enabled — polling stops until you re-enable it. Note that a paused mailbox still counts toward billing; only deleting it changes your subscription — see Manage mailboxes.