Email best practices
Why archive is better than delete
Brief gets smarter the more it learns about you and your relationships from your email. The more email you keep available, the more context Brief can maintain.
As a best practice, archive instead of delete. If you prefer a clean inbox, move emails to Archive or other folders. Brief can still see and use them. Once an email is permanently deleted, Brief loses access to it.
What Brief stores about each email
For each email, Brief generates a set of metadata: a summary, keywords, tags, and envelope data such as recipients, subject, and headers. Brief also maintains a link back to the original message in Gmail or Outlook.
- If you move the email between folders, the link still works.
- If you delete the original, the link breaks and Brief can no longer access the message body.
Your original emails always remain in your source system. Brief is not your system of record.
Contacts best practices
How Brief builds your contact map
Brief builds a map of your contacts in two ways.
- Explicit contacts. Anyone listed in your Google Contacts or Microsoft Contacts is imported and enriched.
- Inferred contacts. Brief also creates inferred contacts to represent people you have interacted with by email, calendar, chat, or other channels but who are not in your address book. This matters because most professional relationships start through messages, not through someone deliberately adding a record.
When the same person uses two email addresses
Brief uses email address to match contacts. If someone already in your contacts writes from a new address that is not on file, Brief will create a separate inferred contact for that address.
Calendar best practices
Why Brief uses your primary calendar by default
Google and Microsoft both let you view multiple calendars. The most common case is viewing calendars from co-workers, a spouse, or shared company calendars.
Brief scans the calendars attached to monitored email addresses. To add another calendar, first add the attached email account.
A note on calendar sync services
If you use a third-party sync service such as CalendarBridge, OneCal, or SyncPenguin to copy events into the calendar Brief is scanning, be aware that these services typically do not preserve the attendee list on the copied event. The original invite went to a different calendar. Propagating updates to attendees from a mirrored event would create confusion, so most sync tools strip the attendee list.
Because the synced meeting on your calendar will not include attendees, Brief will not be able to brief you on who is attending or your history with them.
Two better options:
- Connect the other calendar directly to Brief. Go to Settings → Connections and add the second calendar account.
- Use native calendar sharing. For example, use iCal sharing to give your primary calendar visibility into the other one. Native sharing preserves attendee information.