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 stops ingesting it and marks its stored copy for deletion.
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 marks its stored copy for deletion.
Brief does not delete your originals; your source system stays authoritative. Brief is not your system of record.
Trash and spam, and why they are not permanent
In Gmail, two things take a message out of Brief's reach without deleting it: moving it to Trash, and marking it Spam. Both have the same effect. The message stops feeding your briefings and stops being read for commitments and decisions.
Neither is a one-way door. Pull the message back out of Trash, or mark it not spam, and Brief picks it up again on the next sync. This matters most for spam: a real message caught by a spam filter is invisible to Brief for exactly as long as it sits there, and rescuing it restores it.
Outlook works differently. Brief does not sync the Junk or Deleted Items folders at all, so a message in either is simply not there rather than held aside.
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
An address Brief has not seen before starts out as a contact of its own. It does not necessarily stay that way. Brief has several ways to work out that two addresses belong to one person, and they run after the fact rather than at the moment the mail lands.
Your own address book is the signal you control. A contact record carrying more than one address tells Brief those addresses are one person, and Brief folds the extras onto that contact. Enrichment data supplies a second route, where a vendor record already links someone's alternate addresses. And a background pass compares your contacts against each other and merges the records that look like the same person.
Because those run on their own schedule, a duplicate you notice today can disappear on its own without you touching anything. When you would rather not wait: if you know someone writes from two addresses, put both on their contact record in Google or Microsoft Contacts. That is the one lever here you operate directly, and it settles the question rather than leaving it to be inferred.
Calendar best practices
Which calendars Brief reads
Google and Microsoft both let you keep several calendars on one account, and see calendars belonging to co-workers, a spouse, or the company.
Brief starts with the primary calendar on each connected account and nothing else. That is a starting point rather than a limit: you choose which of an account's calendars Brief reads, and the choice holds.
The control is Manage calendars, on the account's card under Settings → Connections, in the card's Configuration section. It opens a checkbox per calendar on that account, with the primary one tagged Primary. Tick a calendar and Brief begins reading it; untick it and Brief stops. Each change saves as you make it, so there is no Save button to look for, and the dialog names the account it applies to so a second account of the same provider is unambiguous.
Brief's own briefing calendar does not appear in that list. The companion events Brief writes next to your meetings are not something it needs to read back.
This is the fix when Brief seems unaware of meetings you can plainly see — a shared team calendar, or a second calendar you keep your real schedule on. Brief was not reading it, and one checkbox changes that.
Which calendars to leave off
Turning everything on is not the goal. A birthdays calendar or a shared company roster produces entries that look like meetings and are not, and Brief will prepare you for them as though they were. See Connection settings for what that looks like on the screen.
Leave those off, and keep on the calendars that carry real meetings with real attendees.
A calendar on a different account
Manage calendars covers the calendars on one connected account. A calendar living on an account Brief does not have yet is a different job: connect that account first, under Connect another account on the same screen, and its own calendars then appear with their own Manage calendars. See Supported sources and what Brief syncs.
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. This is the one case where a meeting can be on a calendar Brief reads and still produce a thin briefing.
Two better options, in order:
- Connect the other account to Brief directly. Go to Settings → Connections, add the account, and enable the calendar you want under its Manage calendars. Brief then reads the original events, attendees and all.
- Use native calendar sharing. Sharing the other calendar to your account through Google's or Microsoft's own sharing puts it in your calendar list, where Manage calendars can enable it. Native sharing preserves attendee information; a mirroring service does not.