Watch my email. Text me when my boss emails.

Your email app gives you exactly two notification settings, and both of them are wrong.

Setting one: everything buzzes. The newsletter buzzes. The shipping confirmation buzzes. The 40%-off-this-weekend-only buzzes. Somewhere in those 147 vibrations was the one from your boss — and by 2pm your brain has correctly learned that the buzz means nothing, so you've stopped looking.

Setting two: nothing buzzes. Peaceful. Focused. And now you're checking your inbox nineteen times a day anyway, because the contract might have landed, the school might have emailed, your boss might need something. The notifications are off but the checking never stops. You didn't silence your email. You just moved the interruption inside your own head.

The problem was never the volume. The problem is that your email app thinks in messages, and you think in people. There have only ever been a handful of senders whose email you'd want to know about in the same minute it arrived. Your inbox has no idea who they are.

So you tell your agent. Out loud. In one sentence.

Watch my email. Text me if my boss or my wife emails. Ignore everything else.

That's the whole setup. That sentence is a live monitoring rule from the moment you hit send.

What it looks like in real life

Sara just emailed — she needs the revised Q3 numbers before tomorrow's 9am. Want me to draft a reply saying you'll have them to her tonight?

You text back "yes, and remind me at 8." Then you put the phone away and watch your kid swim.

What just happened: you didn't check your email once, and you still caught the only message that mattered within a minute of it landing. The other 31 emails that arrived that afternoon? You'll see the two worth seeing in tomorrow's morning brief. The rest will die unread, which is what they deserved.

That's the trade this feature makes: fewer notifications, with a hit rate of one hundred percent. The buzz means something again.

The rules people actually run

"My boss or my wife" is where most people start. It's rarely where they stop. Because once you realize the rule is just a sentence, you start saying sentences like these:

• "Text me the second anything comes in from the school."
• "Watch for the appraisal report — ping me the moment it lands."
• "If a client emails with 'urgent' anywhere in it, interrupt me."
• "Anything from my Etsy orders, right away. Everything else waits for the morning brief."
• "The contract from Walker. I don't care if it's Sunday."
• "My mom's flight confirmation — grab it and put it on my calendar when it shows up."

Notice what those rules are made of. People. Threads. Topics. Stakes. Not filter syntax, not labels, not a VIP list buried four menus deep in settings. If you can say it, your agent can watch for it — and when the match lands, it doesn't just notify you. It can draft the reply, drop the date on your calendar, or start the follow-up, right there in the same text thread.

Why a sentence beats a settings screen

Here's the thing: everything I just described has been technically possible in Gmail for fifteen years. Filters, stars, VIP senders, priority inbox — the machinery exists. Almost nobody uses it, because configuring it is miserable and maintaining it is worse. The appraisal closes, the project ships, the boss changes — and your carefully built filter set quietly rots.

A watch rule is different because it's conversational all the way down. You set it by saying it. You change it by saying it — "you can stop watching for the appraisal, it came through." You check it by asking — "what are you watching for right now?" There's nothing to maintain because there's no machinery you can see. There's just an agent who knows who matters to you this month, the same way an assistant would.

And your agent already knows who "my boss" and "my wife" are — because it knows you. That's the difference between a personal AI agent and a filter: a filter matches strings; an agent knows your life.

The five-minute setup

The one-time part is connecting your inbox. Text the agent, and it walks you through connecting Gmail or Outlook over OAuth — about five minutes, all by text, no app. (iCloud Mail is on the roadmap. Your calendar comes along with whichever account you connect.)

On the security side, plainly: the connection is OAuth, so we never see or store your email password. Everything in transit is TLS-encrypted, tokens and cached data are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, and the contents of your emails are never written to our operational logs. Your agent watches your inbox for you — that only works if it's answerable to you.

Then you say the sentence. Whatever your version of it is.

The quiet is the feature

People assume the magic moment is the text that arrives. It's not. The magic is the four hundred texts that don't.

Every promo, every newsletter, every reply-all, every "per my last email" — your agent reads them so you don't have to, files what's worth remembering, and holds the merely-interesting stuff for one calm morning brief. The interrupt channel stays sacred: it fires for your people, your deals, your kid's school, and nothing else.

Your inbox stops being a slot machine and starts being a doorbell. It only rings when someone you care about is actually at the door.

I built this feature because I was the guy in the bleachers with his head in his inbox. One sentence fixed it. Yours is waiting.