Mail

Mail is the app with the most tools and the strictest limits. An assistant can read everything in your mailboxes and change nothing.

Can

List your mailboxes, with message and unread counts
List and read messages in any mailbox
Search subjects and senders, or message bodies through an index built on your Mac
List unread mail, newest first

Cannot

Send a message, a reply, or a forward
Delete, move, or archive mail
Mark anything read or unread

Your mailbox stays exactly as you left it. Reading a message through Pomeroy does not mark it read.

Tools

Tool	What it does	Kind
`mail_mailboxes`	Every mailbox with its account, message count and unread count. Start here, because the other tools take names from this list	Read
`mail_list`	Messages in one mailbox, newest first: sender, subject, date, read state and the id to read one in full	Read
`mail_read`	One message in full, by id. Long bodies are cut at 4,000 characters and the reply says so	Read
`mail_search`	Searches headers (subjects and senders) or message bodies. All tokens must match	Read
`mail_unread`	Unread messages, newest first, with the total unread count	Read
`mail_index`	Builds the local body index now and reports what it covered	Read

Try it

Find the flight confirmation from March and tell me the times.
What's unread in my inbox?
Search my mail for the invoice from Northwind.
Read the last message from Priya.
How many messages are in my Archive?

The content index

Searching subjects and senders is live: Pomeroy asks Mail and Mail answers. Searching message bodies is different. Apple Mail has no fast way to search body text from outside, so Pomeroy builds its own index on your Mac the first time you ask for a content search. That first search is slow, taking minutes for a large mailbox. Every later one answers from the index.

The index lives on your Mac and is never sent anywhere. It is Pomeroy’s own bookkeeping, not your data leaving.

Every content answer tells the assistant two things it should pass on: how much of your mail the index covered, and how old it is. So “I found nothing” can be reported honestly as “nothing in the 80% of your mail indexed as of this morning”, rather than as a fact about your inbox.

Expecting a big search? Ask the assistant to build the mail index first, and pay the cost once while you do something else.

Worth knowing

Long messages are cut at 4,000 characters

mail_read truncates and says it has. This keeps one enormous newsletter from swallowing the conversation.

Listing does not include bodies

mail_list returns headers and ids. An assistant reads the bodies it actually needs, one at a time.

Every mailbox Mail shows

Including every account you have set up. mail_mailboxes is how an assistant discovers which ones exist, and its names are what the other tools take.

Sending is not available and never will be

There is no send tool, no reply tool and no draft tool. Mail is the app where a mistaken write is least recoverable and most embarrassing, so Pomeroy does not have the function at all.

Permissions

Switching Mail on asks macOS for permission to control Mail (NSAppleEventsUsageDescription). It is a separate prompt from Notes and Shortcuts.

Pomeroy

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Configuration

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Tools

Try it

The content index

Worth knowing

Permissions

​Tools

​Try it

​The content index

​Worth knowing

​Permissions

Tools

Try it

The content index

Worth knowing

Permissions