Mail: narrow windows and drafts that stay drafts

Mail is the first connector in this level where a mistake reaches other people. Everything before it was reversible inside your own account; an email is not. So the rule for the whole lesson is simple and non-negotiable: Claude drafts, you send.

Authorise the narrowest thing that works — the account you mean, with read scope for a read task. If sending requires a separate grant, that separation is a feature. The connector that cannot send is the connector that cannot send the wrong thing.

Search narrowly, for context reasons as much as privacy ones. Constrain by sender, subject and date so that unrelated mail never enters the session. "Summarise my inbox" pulls an enormous amount of other people's correspondence into context to answer a question that a three-message window would have answered better.

Find messages from priya@example.com about "Q3 invoice"
between 1 and 14 March. Summarise into: decisions,
requests made of me, and unanswered questions. Quote
sparingly. Don't draft a reply yet.

--- then, separately ---

Draft a reply. List the recipients, every factual claim
it makes, and any attachment it references, so I can
check them. Leave it as a draft.

Splitting those two requests matters. Summarise-and-reply in one step produces a reply built on a summary you haven't read yet; doing it in two gives you a checkpoint where the summary is still correctable. And asking the draft to list its own claims and recipients turns review into something you can do in thirty seconds rather than a careful re-read of the prose.

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