What Rolehound reads, and what it keeps

This is the article to read before you connect anything. It states the boundary exactly.

With no mailbox connected, nothing happens

The whole feature is inert until you connect one. No connection means there is nothing to open: the pass records that it was skipped and stops there. There is no other route by which Rolehound reaches your mail.

What it looks at

Your inbox, and specifically the messages that have arrived in it since the last time it looked. Every one of those is read and classified — not only the ones that turn out to be about a job. It is a sweep, not a search. Personal mail is looked at too, and comes back marked irrelevant.

Classifying is an AI call. What is sent is the sender, the subject and a short preview of the message, together with the company and job title of each of your open applications, so the message can be matched to one of them.

What is kept

One row per message: the sender, the subject, a short preview, when it arrived, and what Rolehound decided it meant. The body of the message is not stored.

There is one place a full message is read. When a message is classified as a job alert, its text is fetched and passed to the extraction model to pull the roles out of it. That text is used in flight and is never written to the database; what is kept from it is the roles it produced.

What it will not do

It never sends mail from your account. The interface Rolehound uses to talk to your mailbox has no send method, so there is no code anywhere in it that could.

It never deletes or trashes a message. That same interface exposes no delete either. The only way a message leaves your inbox is being filed into a Rolehound folder, and where the server cannot do that in one operation, the copy is confirmed before the original is expunged — a copy that fails leaves the message exactly where it was. See the Rolehound folders.

Reading a message never marks it as read.

So connect the right mailbox

Because the sweep is unconditional, everything in that inbox gets classified and filed out of it, personal mail included, and a row is written for each. A mailbox you keep for your job search is the sensible one to connect. Your main personal one is not.