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Mailboxes

Star a mail and it becomes a task.

This is the other direction from mail to task: instead of forwarding something, Verdande reads a mailbox you connect and makes a task out of anything you have flagged. Nothing else in the mailbox is touched, and nothing is ever sent.

Each mailbox belongs to the person who connected it. Two people on one instance connect their own and see only their own — there is no shared inbox and no administrator who can read yours.

Gmail

Settings → Integrations → Gmail → Connect.

Gmail needs an OAuth client, which is the instance's registration with Google rather than anybody's account — see Configuration. Once it is set up, each person connects their own mailbox through it.

Choose what makes a task:

Trigger What it reads
Starred Anything you have starred
Label Anything carrying a label you name

The app stays Internal if your client is Internal

An OAuth client registered as Internal in a Google Workspace can only be used by accounts in that workspace. A personal @gmail.com address will be refused with org_internal, and that is the client working as configured. Switching to External means refresh tokens that expire every seven days until Google has verified the app — for one personal account, forwarding to your mail-to-task address is the shorter road.

iCloud, Fastmail and anything else over IMAP

Settings → Integrations → Mailboxes → Add a mailbox.

You need three things:

Field Example
IMAP server imap.mail.me.com:993
Username your address
App password not your ordinary password — see below

The connection is tested before it is saved. A mailbox that cannot be read is refused while you are still looking at the form, rather than accepted and then failing quietly every ten minutes.

Flag a message — the flag, not unread — and it becomes a task on the next sweep. Unread is a state you are still using yourself, and a sync that consumed it would be taking something away.

App passwords

Every host worth naming issues a separate password for applications, which you can withdraw on its own without changing the one you sign in with. Use that.

  • iCloud — appleid.apple.com → Sign-In and Security → App-Specific Passwords
  • Fastmail — Settings → Privacy & Security → Integrations → New app password

The password is encrypted at rest, and it is never returned by the API once saved.

Office 365 does not work here

Microsoft has closed IMAP to passwords; it wants its own OAuth flow. There is no app password that will get you in, and a mailbox pointed at outlook.office365.com will be refused. Forward to your mail-to-task address instead.

How often

Every ten minutes, in the background. Fetch now does it immediately, which is for when you have just connected something and want to see it work.

A run reads at most twenty-five messages, so a mailbox with years of flagged mail in it fills up over several sweeps rather than in one.

Disconnecting

Disconnect on the mailbox. The tasks it made stay — they are your work now, not the mailbox's. Nothing is read after that, and the stored credential is deleted rather than merely disabled.