Emails

Emails is a full-featured, keyboard-first email client built for a services firm. Connect one or more Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes and Bitment gives your team split inboxes that route mail into tabs, internal comments on any message, snooze and remind-me, scheduled send, an AI panel that can triage and draft for you, and CRM-aware search and filing that ties every conversation back to the right client. It's built for operators who live in their inbox all day and want it to move as fast as they do.

Where to find it

Open Emails from the dock. Opened from inside a client, Emails shows that client's linked and matched conversations (Coordination › Emails in the client's sub-navigation). Press ? anywhere in the app for the full keyboard shortcut cheat sheet, and ⌘K for the command palette.

Key concepts

• Account: a connected mailbox (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365). Bitment is multi-account, not unified: you switch mailboxes from the account tab bar at the top, and each tab remembers its own folder, split tab, and even an in-progress search.
• Split inbox: a saved rule (or set of rules) that routes matching mail into its own tab. Every account starts with three system tabs, Important, Calendar, and Other, that come from the provider's own classification; you add your own on top.
• Folder: your existing Gmail labels or Outlook folders, carried over automatically and shown under Folders in the folder drawer.
• Thread: a conversation. Triage actions like Done, Remind me, and Move to act on the whole conversation, not a single message.
• Signature: text (or a designed HTML block) appended to outbound mail, one per account.
• Snippet: reusable text that expands as you type in the composer, with placeholders that fill in automatically.

Connect a mailbox

1. Open Emails from the dock.
2. In the account tab bar at the top, click + Add account.
3. Choose Gmail or Microsoft 365 and complete sign-in on the provider's page. You'll land back in Bitment connected.

Your existing Gmail labels or Outlook folders come across with the account and appear under Folders in the folder drawer (the hamburger button in the toolbar). Mail already filed under one of your own labels or folders shows under that folder instead of cluttering your inbox.

Gmail accounts import your existing Gmail signature automatically. Microsoft gives no way to read a signature, so on Microsoft 365 accounts you write it directly in Bitment.

To manage an account later, its signature, removal, or reconnecting, use the gear next to the account tabs. Right-click an account tab and choose Set as default account to make Emails open to it. On a computer you can also drag the account tabs left and right to reorder your mailboxes; the order is saved to your account and follows you to any computer you sign in on.

If an account stops syncing

Google and Microsoft revoke Bitment's access whenever the underlying sign-in changes, most often after you change or reset your provider password, but also if an admin revokes sessions or you remove Bitment from your connected apps. When that happens you get a notification ("Reconnect <your address>") and the account shows a banner with a Reconnect button. Click either one and complete the provider sign-in; your synced mail stays put, and syncing and sending resume from where they stopped. Until you reconnect, that account sends and receives nothing, and Bitment repeats the reminder every three days for as long as it stays disconnected. If you don't want the account connected any more, use Remove from the gear menu instead; that also stops the reminders and deletes the mail synced from that mailbox.

Emails and Calendar connect separately, even for the same provider account. If a password change knocked out both, reconnecting your mailbox does not reconnect your calendar, and vice versa. See Calendar for its own reconnect flow.

A large mailbox takes a while to import the first time; the account tab shows "Syncing N / M" while it does, and the count can climb into the tens of thousands before it clears.

Search

1. Press / (or click the magnifier in the toolbar) to open Search over the account you're on.
2. As you type, quick suggestions, sender names, subjects, and Ask AI first, appear below the box. Use ↑/↓ to move between them.
3. Press Enter (on the box or a highlighted suggestion) to run the search. It opens a dedicated Search results screen; editing the query there reopens the search box.

Results cover every folder, inbox, sent, archived, spam, and trash, not just the view you started from. Your local results appear instantly while Bitment runs the same search against the provider's full history in the background, so matches older than your imported window stream in moments later.

Results rank by relevance first and recency second: matches on a person's name or address rank highest, then subject, then body mentions, with the newer email winning between comparable matches. Partial words and attachment filenames both work, and a small typo in a name still finds the thread.

Narrow a search with operators, alone or combined with free text:

Split inboxes: route mail into tabs

Split inboxes are the core triage feature: saved rules that sort your inbox into tabs across the top. The three system tabs, Important, Calendar, and Other, come from the provider's own classification and can be reordered but not edited. You create your own on top of them.

1. In the Inbox, click + on the split inbox bar.
2. Give it a name, then define what belongs in it using any combination of three matching methods:

• AI match: describe in plain language what belongs there ("newsletters and marketing email," "anything about the Q3 audit"), and pick the model that judges it.
• A rule: deterministic conditions on sender address, sender domain, recipient, subject text, body text, attachments, or labels.
• Client match: route by whether the email involves one of your firm's clients, including or excluding, across all clients or a chosen list.

1. If you set more than one matching method, the Combine setting decides whether an email needs to match any of them or all of them.
2. Click Save.

Test a description before you save it

Under the AI match box, click Test. It runs your description, exactly as written and not yet saved, against your last 20 inbox emails and shows what it would have caught: a check or a cross per email, and a badge saying whether a rule decided it (free) or the AI did, with the model's one-line reason. Nothing is saved and no mail moves. Read the misses, reword the description, and test again; descriptions that name concrete things work better than vague ones.

Notes that matter in practice:

• AI matching applies to new mail going forward. To sort mail you already have, use Match older mail: set a number of days and run it. Test your description first, since this asks you to confirm before it runs.
• The tab shows a "Matching N…" badge while the AI works through a backlog. Stop matching halts an in-flight run.
• Disable AI matching pauses AI judgment for that split while rules keep routing for free. Process mail since paused back-fills the gap when you re-enable it.
• "Also show matched emails in Important, Calendar and Other" is on by default; uncheck it to make a split exclusive, so its mail only appears in that tab.
• Deleting a split doesn't lose mail, it re-sorts into the remaining tabs.
• Drag tabs to reorder them, system tabs included. On a phone or tablet, press and hold a tab until it lifts, then drag it.
• In the split inbox management view (the gear), the Default tab selector chooses which tab the Emails app opens on for that account, per device.

To see why the AI routed something, open the split for editing and click View match activity: every judgment it made, with the exact exchange behind each one and a way to ask the model why it decided that.

The count badges on tabs

Account tabs and split-inbox tabs carry a small number badge that counts your unread notifications, not unread mail. Reading the notification, from the bell, the Notifications app, or opening the email itself, brings the badge down; marking a message unread again does not bring it back. A badge on an account tab covers that whole mailbox; a badge on a split-inbox tab covers just that tab. To turn these off entirely, disable the Email category under Settings › Notifications.

Triage a message

The triage verbs act on the whole conversation, not just the message you're looking at:

• Done (e) archives it: out of the inbox, still searchable.
• Remind me (h) hides it and brings it back at a time you pick, in plain language ("next Tuesday morning").
• Move to (v) files it under one of your provider folders or labels, which also counts as done.
• Mark as spam (⇧1) moves it to Spam and blocklists the sender, so everything from that address goes straight to Spam afterward; Not spam reverses both.
• Mark important / Not important (⇧2) is available inside the Important and Other tabs and trains the provider's classification.

Clearing the inbox gets you an Inbox Zero screen.

Reading and replying to a thread

Bitment folds a long reply chain away: you see the message the sender actually wrote, with a Show previous content control that opens the quoted history below it. Replies from Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, and Bitment itself are all recognized.

1. Press Reply (r), Reply all (⇧R), or Forward (f) to open a composer directly under the conversation, with the message you're replying to quoted below where you type.
2. Your signature goes above the quote, not underneath the whole thread, and the quote keeps the original's formatting as a collapsible block.

On a phone, Reply / Reply all / Forward sit in a bar pinned to the bottom of the conversation; once the composer is open, that bar becomes Discard / Send.

File an email thread under a client

Open any conversation and the Client section at the top shows how it relates to your CRM: matched automatically, explicitly linked, or not associated yet.

• Automatic matching needs no setup beyond the CRM itself: record a person's email on a client or one of its contacts, and every thread they're on, past and future, appears on that client's Emails page.
• When an address shouldn't become a CRM contact, a vendor's automated sender, a counterparty's assistant, click Add to CRM (or Link to a client when the thread has no outside party) and either save the address onto a client, a contact, a new contact, or a new client, or use Or link this conversation only to file just that thread. Later replies in a linked thread stay linked.
• Linked and matched threads both show in the client Profile's Channels section; linked entries carry an inline ✕ to unlink.

The AI can do this in bulk too: ask it to review a client's correspondence and it can record addresses on contacts or link threads for your approval.

Compose a message

Each recipient sits in its own rounded pill, shown as a plain email address.

1. Type an address and press Enter, comma, semicolon, or space to turn it into a pill. Suggestions from your contacts appear as you type.
2. Click a pill to fix a typo in place, or use the ✕ on a pill to remove it. Backspace in the empty box steps back into the last pill.
3. Reveal Cc / Bcc with the links beside To, or ⌘⇧C / ⌘⇧B.
4. Write your message. Send stays disabled until every address is valid.

Attach a file (and paste a screenshot)

Use the paperclip in the composer footer (⌘⇧A), drag files onto the compose area, or paste: copy a screenshot or an image and press Cmd+V / Ctrl+V in the composer, and it attaches. It becomes a real attachment rather than a picture inside the message body, deliberately, since images pasted into an email body routinely fail to display once the message reaches Gmail or Outlook. The limit is 25 MB per file and per message; the same limit applies in the bulk-email composer.

Snippets

Press ⌘; to open the snippet picker, or type a trigger like ;thanks, then Tab or Enter to insert it. Snippets support placeholders in double curly braces, {{client}}, {{individuals}}, {{date}}, {{quarter}}, {{me}}, which fill in from the recipients and the date when you insert them. Manage them from Manage snippets in the folder drawer, or the snippets button in the toolbar.

Set up your signature

One signature per account, appended to outbound mail. Edit it from the account gear (Manage accounts); each account card has a signature editor with two tabs:

• Design: a visual editor for formatting, links, images, color, and alignment. Paste an image straight into it (Cmd+V / Ctrl+V) and it drops in at the cursor, the one place a pasted image becomes part of the content instead of an attachment. Keep it under 1 MB, since it rides along on every message you send.
• HTML: paste raw HTML and CSS, for a signature designed elsewhere (including with an AI assistant). A live preview shows how it will arrive in the recipient's inbox.

Your style rules are inlined onto the elements they match when the email goes out, since Gmail strips <style> blocks from a received message; rules that can't be inlined (:hover, media queries, @font-face) are kept in a scoped style block that works only in clients that support them. Tables and inline styles are the most reliable choice across Outlook and Gmail; images need a public URL or a small data URL.

The Append to new emails switch is the account default, and each compose can override it. In the composer, the signature sits at the end of the message body itself, so you can edit or delete it right there for that one email without touching your saved signature; switching the From account swaps in that account's signature. On replies and forwards the signature sits above the quoted message, the way Gmail does it.

Scheduled send, undo send, and follow-ups

• Scheduled send: pick a send time in the composer. Scheduled messages live in the Scheduled folder, where you can Edit, Send now, or Cancel send any of them.
• Undo send: every send goes through a short queue, so the toast's Undo really does stop it.
• Remind if no reply: set a follow-up on an outbound message from the clock icon in the composer, or the button in the message action bar. If the deadline passes with no reply, Bitment tells you, whether or not you're in the app at the time.

Clicking a link inside an email

Tapping a link in a message body raises an Open external link? confirmation showing the full destination URL. Open link follows it. If you'd rather not be asked every time, tick Don't ask me again; it's reversible from Settings › Account (or your account dashboard) under Browser › Ask before opening an external link.

Unsubscribe from a newsletter

Open the message and use Unsubscribe (⌘U) in the action bar. Bitment performs the unsubscribe itself, trying a one-click header, then an unsubscribe email, then the link in the body, and tells you which method worked.

Email a group of clients at once

For firm-wide updates, deadline reminders, or announcements, you can email a whole set of CRM clients in one composer, with each recipient still getting their own separate, individually addressed message. No recipient ever sees another's address, and the mailout reads like ordinary one-to-one mail rather than a mass blast.

1. Start from either entry point:

• From the clients list, select the clients you want and choose Bulk email from the bulk actions.
• From the standard email composer, click Clients to open the client picker, choose your recipients, and confirm to switch into the bulk composer with your draft carried over.

1. Write your subject and message once. The bulk composer shows your recipients as a chip list.
2. Click Edit recipients at any point to reopen the picker and adjust your list without losing the draft.
3. Send. Bitment queues one message per recipient and sends them out.

A send is capped at 500 recipients.

The AI panel in Emails

The robot button in the toolbar opens an AI panel beside your mail. It sees what you're currently looking at, the account, the split tab, the open thread, so you can say "draft a reply saying we'll have it Friday" without explaining context.

A drafted reply opens directly in the thread's inline composer for you to edit and send. The panel can also read across your mailbox and bulk-triage ("clear out everything from last month that's just receipts"), and it can create or edit split inboxes for you, staging a change you approve inline.

Open an email or draft the AI showed you

When an AI chat shows you an email, its card carries an Open button that opens that email in the full Emails app, on the account it belongs to. The same button sits on a draft the AI has composed, next to Send and Discard; clicking it opens the draft in the full email composer, carrying whatever you'd typed, so you can finish it with attachments, snippets, or a scheduled send.

Edit an AI-composed draft before it sends

The draft card is a real composer: every field is editable in place. To holds the recipients; Cc and Bcc reveal with small buttons beside To, and are always shown when the AI already filled them, so a hidden recipient can never ship unseen. The body has the composer's formatting toolbar, bold, italics, underline, and lists.

A draft carries a From row at the top of the card, opening on the mailbox the AI picked; change it to any connected mailbox before sending. Underneath the message is that account's signature, shown exactly as it will arrive, with a switch to leave it off for this one email. Switching From swaps the signature to the new account's.

When you press Send on a draft the AI composed, the card turns into the sent email itself, the same read-only card you'd get asking the AI to find a sent message. This works from any AI chat, not just the panel inside Emails: the AI Chat app, the Assistant, or an agent's transcript.

Tips

• Set the Default tab per account if you always want a specific split inbox front and center.
• A rule that handles the obvious cases and an AI description that handles the rest is both cheaper and more predictable than AI matching alone.
• Use Remind me instead of leaving something unread; unread mail doesn't resurface itself, but a reminder does.

Related

• Calendar
• Clients
• Connect Google
• Connect Microsoft
• AI Chat