Knowledge base
Tasks
Give the assistant work to do by itself: on a schedule, when mail arrives, or once in the background.
Details
- A task is an instruction in plain words with something that starts it: a schedule, new mail, or you. "Every weekday at 8, tell me which conversations need a reply and draft one for each." "When an invoice arrives, label it and note the amount and the due date." Tasks live under Tasks in the sidebar.
- You choose how much it may do alone. Ask before every change: it only reads, and everything else waits for you. Organise without asking: it labels, archives, snoozes, drafts and takes notes by itself. Reply without asking: it also answers emails, only to the people already on the conversation.
- Whatever you choose, a new email to somebody outside the workspace, a reply with an added recipient and deleting for good wait under Needs you until you approve them, and you can change the words of an email before it goes. A task can never reach billing, members, domains, rules or keys.
- Every run leaves a record: each step, the tools it used and a short report at the end. Run once hands the assistant a single job to do in the background, and the result shows up under Runs.
- What an email says is read as information, never as an instruction, so a message cannot tell a task what to do. Spam, newsletters, automatic replies and your own mail never start a task, and one conversation starts it at most three times a day.
- A run spends one AI action for every ten steps, and ten with the advanced model. A plan runs 1 active task on Free, 5 on Starter, 25 on Business and any number on Enterprise. When the AI actions of the day are used up, tasks rest until midnight UTC.
- Tasks are for the owner and for people whose role reaches every address, because a task works across the whole workspace.
- Tasks are on the REST API under /tasks, in every SDK as tasks, on the command line as openemail tasks, and on the MCP server, where an agent can set one up, follow its runs and answer what it asks.
- A task reaches the outside apps you connected only when Connectors is turned on under its Extra tools, and then only the apps connected for the workspace, never one that belongs to a single person. It looks things up alone. Every change in an app waits under Needs you, whichever of the three you chose, and such a task no longer replies to mail by itself: every reply waits for your approval.