Gmail: what this connector can do

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What this page is for

The setup guide is for whoever runs your organisation's Botseon deployment: how to register Botseon with the provider so its sign-in screen works. This page is the other half: what Gmail actually lets a bot do once it is connected to your account, what it asks you for along the way, its limits, and how to take the connection away again, in Botseon and at Google.

Search, read, draft, and manage email.

What a bot can do with it

Read — Gmail tells a bot things, nothing changes

Tool	What it does
`gmail.search`	Search the mailbox with a Gmail query string.
`gmail.get_message`	Read one message by id, including its body and the name, type and size of each attachment.
`gmail.get_attachment`	Open a text or PDF attachment of a message and read its text.

Write — Gmail lets a bot change things

Tool	What it does
`gmail.apply_labels`	Add or remove labels on a batch of messages.
`gmail.reply`	Reply to a message in its own thread, optionally with files attached.
`gmail.send`	Send a new message, optionally with files attached.
`gmail.create_draft`	Write a draft, optionally with files attached, for the member to review and send. Nothing is sent.
`gmail.forward`	Forward a message, with its attachments, to an address.
`gmail.create_label`	Create a new label.
`gmail.trash`	Move a message to the bin.

Files: reading them and attaching them

Reading. When a bot reads a message it sees each attachment's name, type and size. It can open a text file (plain text, CSV, Markdown, JSON, XML) or a PDF and read its text. An image, a scanned PDF with no text in it, or a password-protected PDF is listed but not read, and the bot is told why. It never guesses at the text.

Attaching. A mail the bot sends, replies with or leaves as a draft can carry files of two kinds:

a file that is already in your mailbox, attached to another message (the invoice from your supplier, for example), which goes out exactly as it came in;
a text file the bot writes itself, such as a CSV summary or a note, named by the bot.

The approval card for that mail shows the recipient and lists every file on it, so you see what would leave before anything does. A draft with files waits in your Gmail Drafts with the files on it, and you send it yourself.

Gmail's own rules apply. One mail carries at most 10 files, and they can add up to at most 25 MB. A work or school account can have a lower limit, set by your administrator. Gmail never lets a program or script file be sent (.exe, .js, .bat, .vbs and the other types on Gmail's list). The bot is refused with a sentence saying why, and nothing is sent.

The permissions it asks for, in plain words

Every call a bot makes through this connector is tagged with what kind of thing it is. Only the tags below ever apply here — a tag this connector's tools never carry is not listed, because it can never ask you for it.

read — Looks something up. Nothing changes, and nothing is sent anywhere. A bot never has to ask first for this.
write — Changes something inside the connected account — creates, edits or files something. Asks you first, unless you have told Botseon to always allow that exact action.
external_send — Sends something to someone outside Botseon — a message, a reply, an email, a post. Asks you first, unless always-allowed.
delete — Deletes something you would consider yours. Always asks first — there is no always-allow rule that ever covers this.

Limits

Search, read, draft, and manage email. Nothing outside that list is possible through this connector, however a bot is asked to use it.

Gmail is also only ever as wide as the scopes your organisation's connected app actually requests — the exact scopes are on the setup guide, because narrowing or widening them is a decision for whoever runs your deployment, not for this page.

Disconnecting

In Botseon

Open Plugins from the sidebar, press this connector's card to open its detail page, and under Accounts press Remove next to the account — or Uninstall to remove the plugin and every account connected to it at once. Either one revokes the stored connection immediately: nothing more is read or changed through it from that moment on. Install a plugin walks through the same screen step by step.

At Google

Removing the account in Botseon also asks Google to revoke the token, when this deployment's connector is configured with a revoke URL. Confirm the grant is actually gone by opening Google's own account settings — the connected-apps, security or authorised-apps page covers it — and removing Botseon there too if it still shows up. That is also where you can revoke access without going through Botseon at all, which is worth knowing if you ever lose access to your Botseon account.

What Botseon keeps, and how your data is used

Whatever a bot reads or writes through this connector becomes part of your conversations and the record of that run — the same records, and the same retention schedule, as everything else a bot works on. Botseon is the processor for that content; your organisation decides what it may read and remember, and can delete it sooner than the schedule would on its own.

Your data is sent to a model provider only to produce the bot's answer, and for nothing else — it is not used to train any model. The Privacy Policy's Models and How long we keep it sections have the full detail, including exactly how long each kind of record is kept for.