AI email client for Gmail: what Conduit Mail actually does

An AI email client for Gmail is a separate app that connects to your existing Gmail account and puts AI where the work is: summarizing threads, drafting replies, searching in plain English, and sorting mail as it lands. Conduit Mail, in early access, is one of them. This is a tour of every AI feature Conduit has, and where each one stops.

Three catches, up front, so you can decide whether the rest is worth reading: the category sorting is unreliable today, the Free plan caps you at five automation rules, and rules never run backwards over mail you already have.

What is an AI email client for Gmail?

It is a client, not a mail service. Conduit sits on top of the Gmail account you already have. You sign in with Google, grant access, and the first sync pulls your mail down.

Your address and your existing mail stay where they are. What Conduit files or labels is a real change in your Gmail account, and it stays there whether or not you keep using Conduit.

That is the sync contract, and it is the first thing to be clear about with any third-party Gmail client. Archive, read state, stars, and labels are written back through the Gmail API, and mail you send from Conduit is sent by Gmail, so it lands in your Gmail Sent folder. Open the Gmail app on your phone afterwards and it shows the same state.

That distinction is the whole design. The layout is a familiar three-panel client: folders on the left, list in the middle, message on the right. Nothing about reading mail is a new paradigm you have to learn.

The AI lives in a side panel, in the composer, and in the rules screen, which is to say: in the three places where email is actual work. We wrote up the reasoning behind that in why we built Conduit Mail.

Conduit runs in the browser and there is nothing to install. The app itself lives at in.conduitmail.app; during early access you request access from conduitmail.app first. On a phone it is the same web app, installable to the home screen. Desktop and native mobile builds are a separate question with a separate answer, and that answer is kept current on the download page instead of here, where it would go stale.

One more setup fact: every plan, including Free, gets the whole mail client and an unlimited number of connected accounts. Plans differ on AI capacity and a few gates, not on whether you get real email software.

Ask Conduit: summaries, drafts, and search in one panel

Hit ⌘K and the AI panel opens next to the message you are looking at. It does four things.

Summaries. A twenty-message thread with three people arguing about a date gets a TLDR. You read the summary, then decide whether the thread deserves the original.

Drafts and replies. Ask for a reply and you get one, written from the thread’s context rather than from a blank box.

Search in a sentence. Type what you remember instead of what Gmail’s operator syntax wants. The sentence gets turned into structured filter chips you can see and edit, so you always know what it actually searched for.

Acting on your behalf. The panel can do things, not just say things: file a message, apply a label, start a draft. Every action goes through a confirm card first, and an activity strip shows each tool call it made. You are approving specific operations, not a vibe.

The composer has its own AI, separate from the panel. It drafts in your voice, which it learns from short writing samples taken from your sent mail, and it does rewrite, grammar, and tone passes inline. The writing samples are stored, they are visible in Settings, and you can turn them off in Settings → Writing style.

Here is the boundary. Every one of these features waits for you to ask. Nothing in the panel or the composer fires on its own. Exactly one AI feature runs unprompted, and it is the next section.

Smart Inbox: six categories, sorted as mail lands

New mail gets sorted into six categories: People, Notifications, Social, Newsletters, Promotions, and Transactions. It happens as mail arrives, without you asking, on every plan.

These six are Conduit’s own categories, not Gmail’s tabs. Gmail’s Primary, Social and Promotions labels are read as an opening hint, then Conduit’s classifier makes its own call, and the result lives in Conduit rather than relabeling anything in the Gmail account.

It sorts. We are not going to tell you it sorts correctly — that is the one verb we can defend today.

Categorization results are inconsistent enough today that an overhaul is queued. Until that ships, treat the six categories as a useful first pass that you will disagree with sometimes, not as a filing system you can stop supervising. If a post promises you a category will reliably catch a specific sender, that post is overselling.

What we can be precise about is where the sorting happens, because that is a privacy fact and privacy facts do not get to be approximate:

• Free plan: sorting runs entirely on your device and sends nothing.
• Paid plans: the local classifier runs first, and only the messages it is unsure about get a second look. For those, the sender, subject, a short preview, a few mailing-list headers and a category hint go to Anthropic. Never the body.

Both halves of that split matter. A post that says “only the sender, subject, a short preview, a few mailing-list headers and a category hint leave” without saying that the Free plan sends nothing at all has described the product wrong.

Plain-English automations instead of Gmail filter syntax

Gmail filters make you think in a query language. Conduit’s rules let you write the condition the way you would say it, then compile it into something explicit you can inspect.

Under the plain-English surface is a real engine: twelve condition types, twelve action types, and AND/OR condition trees so a rule can say “from this domain, and either the subject mentions an invoice or it has an attachment.” Conditions include AI-evaluated ones, where the test is a described judgment rather than a string match, plus stateful ones like a sender exceeding a rate or a message reaching a certain age in hours. Actions cover the usual filing and labeling, plus digests, webhooks, and notifications.

Rules can also run on a schedule rather than on arrival, using cron triggers, with a real IANA timezone so “every weekday at 07:00 in New York” survives the clocks changing. Creating a scheduled rule is a Pro-plan feature, but execution is not wired up yet. Until it lands, a scheduled rule sits there without acting, so don’t plan around one. Rules that fire on arrival work on every plan.

The rule count is where the free plan bites. If your instinct is one rule per newsletter, one per airline, one per school, one per store, you will pass five quickly. The Free plan allows five automation rules. Unlimited rules are on the paid plans, so plan your rules with that number in front of you rather than discovering it at rule six. Pricing is on the plans page.

Rules act forward, not backward. A rule you create today applies to mail that arrives from now on. Write a rule, then watch what it does to the next few days of mail. The newsletters already piled up in there are a cleanup job, not a rule.

Connecting Claude to the same mailbox

Conduit runs a hosted MCP server at connect.conduitmail.app/mcp. It is available on Plus and up. MCP is the Model Context Protocol, and what it means practically is that an assistant works your mailbox through a defined set of tools, authorized over OAuth.

The assistant on the other end can be Claude (claude.ai, Claude Desktop, or Claude Code), Codex, ChatGPT, or any other MCP client. Whichever it is, it is the MCP client here, not a piece of Conduit. Conduit’s side is the server and the gates. The connection uses OAuth 2.1 with PKCE over Streamable HTTP, and exposes 20 tools.

The gates are the part worth reading closely, because “let an AI into my email” deserves specifics:

• Consent is granted per scope, and it never widens on its own. An app approved to read does not quietly gain the ability to write.
• New connections default to drafts only. Claude can compose; it cannot put anything in the outbound queue by default.
• Direct sending is a separate opt-in, with a daily cap, set to 50 by default, and every direct send gets a 60-second undo window.
• Permanent delete and moving mail between folders are withheld entirely, even from a connection with full access. There is no tool to call. Trash is allowed, because it is reversible: the message moves to Trash and can be moved back.
• Every call is audit-logged per connected app, visible in Settings → Integrations. You can see what an assistant did, not just that it was connected.

Setup, scopes, and what an agent can do are on the agents page.

What runs on your device and what leaves your Gmail account

Mail passes through our servers on its way to you. It is not stored there. There is no table in our database for your email.

Search is a good illustration. Keyword search runs on your device, against mail already stored there, and nothing is indexed on our servers. Natural-language search is a two-step: the sentence you type is interpreted by Claude and turned into filter chips you can edit, and the filters then run against the copy of your mail that is already on your machine.

What we do store is a short list, and it exists so Conduit behaves the same on every device you sign in from: your account identity; your OAuth tokens and mail-server credentials, encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they touch the database; your rules, notes, and settings; short writing samples from your sent mail so drafts sound like you everywhere; and AI usage counters, which are numbers with no content attached.

What we do not store: full mailboxes, message HTML, attachments.

“Never” is a word worth rationing, so here is where it applies without conditions. Your email is never used to train AI models. Not by us, and not by Anthropic, whose commercial API terms forbid it. Google’s restricted-scope rules bind us to the same thing in writing.

Two outside checks back the Gmail side of this. Google verified Conduit for restricted Gmail access, covering branding and restricted-scope data handling. And Conduit completed Google’s CASA Tier 2 security assessment, an independent review by TAC Security, a Google-authorized lab. The rest of the security posture, including how email HTML is sandboxed and what the certificate rules are, is written out in the security overview rather than retold here.

What it costs, and what early access includes

Conduit is in early access. Billing is not open, private beta access is complimentary, and nobody is charged today. The numbers below are what paid plans will cost at public launch, not what you would pay to try it now.

• Free — $0. Standard AI, 5 automation rules, no MCP, no scheduled rules.
• Plus — $9/mo. Smarter AI at about 6× the Free allowance, unlimited rules, MCP access.
• Pro — $27/mo. Smarter AI at a larger allowance still, unlimited rules, MCP access, and the ability to create scheduled rules (execution is not wired up yet).
• Boost packs, one-time AI top-ups that do not roll over: $3 on Free, $5 on Plus, $10 on Pro.

Every tier gets the whole client and unlimited connected accounts. The plan changes how much AI you get, how capable it is, whether rules are capped at five, whether Claude can connect, and whether you can create scheduled rules. It does not change whether you have working email software. The full table is on the pricing page, and the home page has the shorter version.

That is the tour: an AI side panel and composer that wait to be asked, sorting that runs on its own and is still being improved, rules in plain English with a forward-only, five-on-Free catch, and an MCP server with permanent delete and folder moves deliberately missing.

Conduit is in early access. Request access at conduitmail.app and the first sync through your own mail will tell you more about whether this fits than another paragraph from us will.