How Dustav reads your mail

The heart of Dustav is a background reader that makes one real pass over every inbound email — not a keyword scan, not a subject-line skim. It reads the message, the thread it belongs to, and the attachments (PDFs, images, Word documents, spreadsheets — an order sheet's actual cell values, not a guess at them). If it needs more context it goes and gets it: searching your mailbox, reading the earlier conversation, checking what it already knows about your business.

What comes out the other side is an operator card on your Inbox — the email, decoded:

• What this is and what it wants — the one-line read, so you can triage forty conversations by eye.
• A drafted reply, in your voice — learned from your own sent mail, ready to review and send.
• What it did about it — dates lined up for your calendar, rows filed into your workflows, receipts and invoices into Paperwork, owed actions onto TODO, and a folder suggestion for the email itself.

Noise — the newsletter, the shipping notification that needs nothing — is recognized and passed over for pennies, so your attention (and your balance) is spent on the mail that's actually your business.

It keeps up with your Gmail, both directions

Dustav mirrors your real Gmail continuously. Archive something in the Gmail app on your phone and it's archived here; read state matches Gmail exactly — an email is unread until you open it, in either place. Your own sent mail is read too: when you answer something yourself, Dustav notices, closes the loop on its side, and quietly withdraws any draft it had prepared for the same thing.

When it can't figure something out

Dustav doesn't guess silently. A schedule it can't safely file becomes a "review this with me" card; something about your business it doesn't know yet stays a [bracket] in the draft — you fill it in when you reply, and what you wrote lands on Intelligence as a fact it keeps. And when something genuinely breaks — a workflow that couldn't collect, a read that failed — it tells you, on the record.

Checking its work

Every card carries a "What Dustav did" trace: the reasoning per step and a chip for each action taken, kept with the email permanently. If a row looks wrong or a date looks off, the trace shows where it came from — and correcting it is a conversation away. More on this in everything on the record.