AI Agent

Inbound Email: How It Works & Limits

What happens when you email the agent, including attachments, replies, and current limitations.

When you email your personal agent address, the assistant reads the message, acts on it unattended, and emails you back. This page walks through that flow and the current limitations to keep in mind.

If you haven't found your address yet, start with Inbound Email: Set Up Your Address.

The flow#

  1. You email or forward a message to your agent address (from your account email — see the setup page).
  2. ClearSpan verifies and accepts the message: it confirms the sender matches your account and that your firm has AI access.
  3. The assistant runs in the background, using the same tools and your firm scope as the chat assistant. The subject line and body become its instruction; long quoted-reply tails from forwarded threads are trimmed so your actual ask stays on top.
  4. You get an email reply with the assistant's response.
  5. The conversation appears in Chat History automatically, so you can review it or continue it in the web app.
Note

Forwarded emails can contain third-party content. The assistant treats instructions embedded inside forwarded material with caution and acts on your intent — it won't blindly follow commands buried in a forwarded message.

Attachments#

You can attach files to an email and the assistant will ingest them, the same way chat attachments work: the same accepted types (PDF, images, CSV, XLSX, DOCX), the same 10 MB-per-file limit, and the same per-conversation cap.

Because an email is fire-and-forget, anything oversize or of an unsupported type is simply skipped — the assistant works with what it can read rather than rejecting the whole message.

Replies and loop prevention#

Replies are sent from ClearSpan's outbound address to you — never back to the inbound address — and are tagged so they can't bounce back and re-trigger the agent. You won't accidentally create an email loop by replying.

If something goes wrong (a usage limit, or an internal error), you'll still get an email letting you know rather than silence.

When an email is ignored#

For security and abuse protection, an inbound email is silently dropped if:

  • the From: doesn't match your account email,
  • your account isn't a firm member, or
  • your firm doesn't have AI access enabled.

These rejections are intentionally quiet, so don't expect an error reply in those cases — double-check you're sending from your account address.

Current limitations#

Warning

Each inbound email starts a fresh conversation. There's no multi-turn email threading yet — replying to the agent's email doesn't continue the same conversation. To continue a thread, open it in Chat History.

The email agent also works within your existing projects — it can't create a new project from an email yet. Set up the project in the web app first, then email the assistant to work inside it.