Email Belongs in the Case: Why We Built Mail Into Herarx
Half of every matter happens in email. A case system that cannot see it is only ever half right. Here is how Mail works, and what it does not do.
We resisted building an email client for a long time. Email clients are hard, everyone already has one, and the world does not need another inbox. What changed our mind was watching how people actually worked: they would read an email, switch to the case, type a summary of the email, then go back and forward the email to a colleague who would type their own summary. The case never held the truth; it held a paraphrase.
What Mail is
Mail lives inside Herarx. Connect a mailbox — Sign in with Google or Sign in with Microsoft are the recommended paths; there is no password to hand over — or connect manually over IMAP, POP and SMTP. Read, reply, forward, schedule. Several mailboxes can be connected; an organisation can add a shared one.
The feature that matters is file into case. One click attaches the message — headers, body, attachments, timestamps — to the case it belongs to. Reply from the case and the reply files itself. Start a new email from the case and the thread is linked from the first message. Bulk-select a conversation and add all of it at once.
What Mail does with your messages
Messages are encrypted at rest with the same machinery as files. Search inside Mail runs over an encrypted blind index, so the server can find your messages without being able to read them in the clear. Nothing in Mail is used to train anything, and the automatic relevance scoring we experimented with is switched off.
Who gets it
Mail is a Max feature in the personal workspace. In an organisation it is included for every member whose role enables it. It is in beta and you accept the Mail terms before first use — we want that to be an informed choice, because you are trusting us with an inbox.
What it is not
Mail is not a replacement for your main email client, and it does not try to be. It is missing things a general-purpose client has and always will. Its job is narrow: make it effortless for the emails that belong to a case to end up in the case, as they are, not as someone remembers them.
Case references
Emails sent from a case carry a reference in the subject — configurable per workspace with tokens for the case number, title or a field of your choice — so that replies, weeks later, find their way home. If the reference is missing, the incoming mail suggestions panel proposes a case based on the sender and the thread; you confirm with a click.
