1. Connect your mailbox

OAuth into Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 with least-privilege scopes. For other providers, connect via standard IMAP with encrypted-at-rest credentials. Connect more than one mailbox — sales, support, founder — and assign each a mailbox type (campaign, monitoring, or general).

2. Messages thread automatically

Every incoming message threads by RFC 822 message-id and references. EmpireVault links the thread to a CRM contact if it recognizes the sender — or creates a draft contact if not. AI scores each message by importance using sender history, subject, and body. VIP contacts auto-elevate to critical.

3. Reply from inside EmpireVault

Open a thread, hit reply. The composer is a rich-text editor that produces multipart/related email — text body + HTML body + CID-embedded images — so your replies render the same in Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and on mobile. Sent messages stay in the thread for everyone with access to that contact.

AI importance scoring

Every incoming message is scored 1-5 for importance. The score uses sender history (have they replied to you?), subject patterns, body content (is this a billing question, a complaint, a meeting request?), and behavior over time. Top messages bubble up. Low-importance messages stay collapsed.

VIP contacts

Flag any contact as VIP and their messages auto-score critical. Useful for executive customers, partners, or anyone you can’t afford to miss. VIP status applies retroactively — past messages from the contact re-surface as VIP.

Mail Diary — inbox + calendar in one timeline

Mail Diary is the unified view that fuses your inbox and your calendar into a single chronological timeline. See “what’s happening this week” as a single feed: meetings, emails, scheduled sends, drafts. Filter by contact, by mailbox, or by importance. This is the biggest difference vs. Superhuman, Front, Spike, or any single-purpose inbox tool — your email and your calendar share context.

Monitoring dashboard

A single dashboard surfaces every account’s sync health — last successful sync time, recent errors, send failures, unread counts by mailbox type. If a mailbox falls behind or starts bouncing, you see it in seconds, not the next time someone complains.

Retention policy

Configurable retention per mailbox type. Campaign mailboxes can keep 90 days; monitoring mailboxes 365 days; general mailboxes indefinite. Expired messages are auto-purged by a background job. Useful for both storage cost and compliance.

Audit trail on every action

Every inbox action — opening, replying, deleting, marking — is logged in the platform audit log. Useful when you need to reconstruct who said what to whom and when, especially across a team that shares an inbox.

It’s not a separate inbox app

Standalone inbox tools (Superhuman, Front, Spike) are great at being inboxes. They’re also just inboxes — they don’t know your CRM, your tickets, your quotes, or your calendar. EmpireVault’s inbox knows all of those because they live next door. A reply to a sales prospect picks up the open deal. A reply to a customer surfaces their last ticket. The context comes free.

Email + calendar, one timeline

Mail Diary is the feature most other tools don’t ship — your week as a single feed, with email and meetings side by side. If you’ve ever toggled between your inbox and your calendar 40 times a day, this is the fix.

Replies that render right

The composer ships multipart/related email — text body + HTML body + inline CID-embedded images — so your replies render identically across every mail client. No “the image showed in Gmail but broke in Outlook” surprises.