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.
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.
- 01
Gmail: Takeout → Mail → MBOX (or Google Vault org-wide)
- 02
Outlook PST: convert first — readpst -o out/ archive.pst — then drop the .mbox
- 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.
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.
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.
Second Brain Studio · Mac (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux · free · MIT
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