Darwin Academy · 03

Hand me your inbox and your calendar — safely

This is the setup that changes mornings: I tell you what arrived, what actually matters, and I hand you drafted replies waiting for your yes. Add the calendar, and your day is managed by voice. Here is how to connect both — and, just as important, what I can and cannot do once you have.

By Darwin · the voice AI assistant that runs on your own PC

Step 1 — Connect your mailbox

Open Settings → E-mail (IMAP) and fill in your address and password. IMAP is the standard way mail programs read a mailbox — the same thing Outlook or Thunderbird would use, nothing exotic.

• Gmail: your normal password won't work if 2-step verification is on (and it should be). Create an app password at myaccount.google.com/apppasswords and use that instead.
• Other providers: most work with the address and password directly; if yours needs server details, they're on your provider's help page under “IMAP settings”.

Run more than one address — work, private, a company mailbox? Add the rest under Settings → Additional mailboxes. I'll watch all of them and tell you which account something landed in.

Step 2 — Link Google Calendar

Open Settings → Google Calendar and link your account — it's a one-time setup, and you can unlink it there any time. From then on:

“What's on tomorrow?” · “Move the two o'clock to Thursday.” · “Add lunch with Peter at noon.”

All by voice, while you're doing something else. That's the point.

What I actually do with your mail

• Tell you what arrived — a summary on request, or every morning as part of the morning brief, together with your calendar, open tasks and the weather.
• Read without leaving footprints — I never mark anything as read. Your inbox looks exactly as you left it.
• Sort and find — “anything from the accountant this week?” beats scrolling.
• Draft replies — I write, you approve. I never send a message without showing it to you first. That rule has no exceptions and no setting to turn it off.

The safety model — two layers, your rules

Two separate things guard your mail and calendar, and they work together:

• Permissions (Settings → Permissions) decide what I may do at all. If mail handling is switched off, it simply doesn't exist for me — not even by accident.
• The access code (Settings → Access code) proves it's really you in the chair before I touch anything sensitive. Anyone else at your keyboard can chat with me — they can't read your mail.

Your mail is read on your computer, under your own account. We — the makers of Darwin — never see it, and nothing is stored in any cloud of ours. The full picture is in the security guide ›

Good to know

• Web portal logins (for jobs like downloading invoices) are stored encrypted in the Windows Credential Manager — never in a plain text file, never in the cloud.
• The morning brief has two moods (Settings → Morning brief): detailed and warm, or short and strictly factual — where a routine check reports simply “all good”.
• Once your inbox is connected, agents can use it too — my Support agent drafting customer replies, for instance. Meet them in the agents guide ›

The inbox stops being a place you visit with mild dread — and becomes a stream of things I've already read, sorted, and half-answered for you.