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Sources · Company source · export guide

Export a mailbox (mbox) into a Company Brain — headers only

Email is the longest relationship record a company has, and the one nobody should let an AI read. This source reads the envelope: who wrote to whom, how often, how recently. Subjects and bodies are never accessed.

.mboxzero network calls in the buildtext never read

What a Email (mbox) export holds — and what the brain makes of it

Export Mail from Google Takeout as MBOX (or org-wide through Google Vault); an Outlook PST is converted first with readpst, then the resulting .mbox is dropped in. The brain builder reads every correspondent’s display name with a per-person frequency and recency. Correspondents become people notes; the frequency and recency become relationship strength on each one. That is all — the parser never opens a subject line or a body.

In a Company Brain the mail signal is what tells you a dormant account is not actually dormant: someone on your side is still writing to someone on theirs every month. Beside the CRM export, that is a revival lead.

Get the export

How to export your Email (mbox) data

The exact clicks, as they are today. Platforms move menus; the engine’s source docs are updated when they do.

  1. 01

    Gmail: Takeout → Mail → MBOX (or Google Vault org-wide)

  2. 02

    Outlook PST: convert first — readpst -o out/ archive.pst — then drop the .mbox

  3. 03

    Drop the archive on Email (mbox) in Studio’s Sources — or tell Claude Code or Codex “build my brain from this”. The source is detected by itself, even inside a combined archive.

Second Brain Studio — Sources — one export and its files on the John Carter demo brain (light)
Studio › Sources the files one export was built from — a newer export is dropped here

Then, next month

An export is a snapshot. Drop a newer one and press Update: your edits and _notes/ are kept, and the update report says what changed.

How Update works

Then ask it

What you can ask a brain built from Email (mbox)

Examples, not promises: the answer is whatever your notes hold, and every answer cites the notes it came from. The more exports you add, the more these questions cross sources.

  • Who on our team is in the most frequent contact with this account?
  • Which external correspondents went quiet in the last six months?
  • Which people do we email who are in no CRM record at all?

limitHeaders only — the brain cannot search what an email said. Other people’s addresses are dropped at parse time; only names and the relationship remain.

Good to know

The honest answers.

Does it read the emails? No. Headers only: the sender and recipient names and the dates. Subjects and bodies are never accessed, and that rule is in open-source code.

How do I export from Outlook? Export a PST, convert it with readpst (readpst -o out/ archive.pst) and drop the .mbox it produces into the email folder.

Start

Your company’s exports already exist. Turn them into a brain.

Free and open source on your own machine. Or hand us the exports — done-for-you onboarding is in early access.

Download for MacApple silicon (M1–M4)

Second Brain Studio · Mac (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux · free · MIT

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