Connecting Gmail

Your mailbox is where most of a promo shop's real deadlines live: the approval you are waiting on, the supplier who asked a question, the quote nobody answered. Connecting Gmail gives Scout permission to read that mail so it can raise points — single items with the thread that proves them — and nothing else.

Before you start

• You need the Google account whose mail you want read. You connect your own mailbox; you cannot connect a colleague's for them.
• Gmail is a per-person connection. Each person on your team authorizes their own mailbox, and the Connections card shows how many have.
• If your company runs Google Workspace, your Google administrator may need to approve Scout for the whole domain before the consent screen will finish. Google shows you a message saying so; ask your administrator to approve it, then start again.

Connect your mailbox

1. Open Connections from your avatar menu.
2. Find the Google card under Communication. It reads "Gmail Inbox and Sent messages, participants, threads, and attachment details — read-only."
3. Choose Connect.
4. Scout hands you to Google. Pick the account you want Scout to read from Google's account chooser. If you are signed in to several Google accounts, check carefully — the one you pick is the one Scout reads.
5. Read Google's consent screen. Scout asks for one permission: read-only access to Gmail. There is no send permission, no delete permission and no calendar or contacts permission in the request. Choose Continue (Google's button wording varies).
6. Google returns you to Scout. The Google card now shows CONNECTED and a freshness line, and your mailbox appears under Manage access as a PERSONAL MAILBOX.

Screenshot: the Google card after one person has connected.

If Google refuses, or you close the window part-way, nothing is created. Scout treats an unfinished authorization as abandoned and expires it; start again from Connect. A link to the consent screen only works in the browser that started it, so a connect link forwarded to someone else will not complete.

What Scout reads, and what it never touches

Scout reads:

• Messages in your Inbox and Sent mail — who wrote to whom, when, the subject, the message text, and the thread each message belongs to.
• Attachment details — that an attachment exists, its name, type and size.

Scout does not:

• Send, reply to, forward, label, archive or delete anything. The permission Scout holds cannot do those things.
• Read your Google Drive, Calendar or Contacts.
• Show your message bodies or attachments to a colleague because a point was routed to them. Original mail stays with you; see Personal mail, privacy, and the Visibility Review.
• Keep a copy of the message to read whenever it likes. Scout stores the facts it extracted and the proof it cites, not a mirror of your mailbox.

The first hours

1. The backfill. Scout starts reading history immediately, oldest-to-newest in batches, and can look back up to a year by default. The Look-back control on the connection page offers 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years and 5 years; five years is the cap.
2. Run history. Open the card to watch it. Each row is one read, with when it started, how long it took, how many messages it SEEN, how many were NEW, and the RESULT.
3. Then continuous reading. After the backfill, Scout re-reads every few minutes and also takes a hint from Google when new mail lands, so a message usually reaches Scout within minutes.
4. Points appear as Watches find something. A mailbox on its own does not fill your Inbox. Points appear when a Watch — one of Scout's analyzers — finds something in what it read. A quiet first morning is normal, especially on a small book.

Freshness is measured against the cadence. If Scout has not had a successful read for a couple of hours, the card moves to NEEDS ATTENTION and the detail page says how long it has been since the last success. Four missed cycles is the threshold, which tolerates a blip but catches a revoked authorization before you reply to something you cannot see.

If more than one mailbox sees the same message

Two connected mailboxes often hold the same thread — you and the person you copied. Scout reconciles those into one item rather than raising it twice, and decides which connected source is authoritative for each address. That is why a conversation you and a colleague can both see produces one point, not two.

Good to know

• You can disconnect your own mailbox at any time from the connection page. Items Scout already raised stay; Scout stops reading and deletes its stored authorization. See The connection detail page.
• Revoking Scout's access from your Google account settings also works. Scout notices on its next read, moves the card to SYNC FAILED, and asks an administrator to reconnect it.
• If your plan's mailbox allowance is smaller than the number of mailboxes connected, Mailbox processing priority decides which ones get read in full.
• A shared or group mailbox in Google is still a mailbox somebody signs in to. If you want work from it to route to a team rather than to a person, connect it and then change its owner — see Team-owned versus personal sources.
• Scout prepares, you send. Scout can write you a draft reply to copy, but it will never put a message in your Sent folder.