The Linbis mail client
Working your mailbox inside Linbis — folders, Junk rescue, search operators, snippets and signatures, scheduled send, Trash and Archive, and what each one does to the mailbox your provider holds.
Linbis reads your real mailbox. When you connect Gmail, Outlook or an IMAP account, the Emails entry in the sidebar becomes a working mail client — not a copy of your inbox, and not a separate inbox you have to keep in step with the one you already use.
That distinction runs through everything on this page, so it is worth stating once, plainly:
Linbis and your mail provider are the same mailbox seen twice. Some actions here change only what Linbis shows you. Others are meant to change what Outlook or Gmail shows you too. Each section below says which is which — and where the second half is not finished yet, it says that as well.
The unified mail surface
Everything lives at /freight-desk. One list, one reading pane, one composer, whichever provider the mail arrived through and whichever of your connected mailboxes it landed in. If you have more than one mailbox connected you can work them together or one at a time.
If a mailbox stops syncing, the mail surface tells you so instead of quietly showing you a shorter list. A mailbox that has gone dead — expired credentials, a revoked grant, a provider outage — is named in the banner, with what the provider said and when it last worked. This matters more than it sounds: a mailbox that produces nothing looks exactly like a quiet Tuesday.
Junk rescue, and what Import means
Real quote requests land in Junk. Every forwarder knows it, and the usual workaround is to go read Junk in Outlook and forward the message to yourself.
/freight-desk/junk shows you the junk folder of each connected mailbox, read-only, so you can see what your provider filtered out without leaving Linbis.
Nothing on that screen is in Linbis yet. Reading it changes nothing. Import is the gesture that changes something, and it is worth being precise about what it does:
Import hands the message to the AI assistant. It pulls that one message through the same ingestion path a normal inbox arrival takes — so it gets classified, data gets extracted from it, and it can turn into proposed actions, exactly as if it had arrived in the inbox in the first place.
That is the whole point — a quote request that landed in Junk should end up on your board like any other. But it means Import is a deliberate act, one message at a time, chosen by you. Junk mail is never swept in automatically, and a message sitting in Junk that you have not imported is invisible to the assistant.
Two limits to know today:
- IMAP mailboxes cannot import from Junk yet. The screen will tell you rather than failing silently. This arrives with folder discovery.
- On Outlook, importing a junk message can later produce a duplicate. Microsoft gives a message a different id in each folder, so if you import a message from Junk and afterwards move it to the Inbox in Outlook, Linbis can see the moved copy as a new message. We ship this knowingly, and we log it, because junk visibility with an occasional duplicate beats no junk visibility at all.
Searching
Search takes plain words, and it also takes operators when plain words are not enough:
| Operator | Finds |
|---|---|
subject: | Messages whose subject contains the text |
to: | Messages sent to that address |
cc: | Messages that cc'd that address |
Combine them freely, and combine them with ordinary search words. subject:arrival to:ops@ is a
legitimate search.
Two things behave the way you would hope rather than the way search boxes often do. Punctuation is
literal — searching subject:50% looks for fifty percent, not "50 followed by anything". And the
result count in the header counts the same messages the list is showing you; it is not a separate,
looser estimate.
The folder navigator, and what an un-synced folder count means
The folder navigator shows the real folders in your provider mailbox, including ones Linbis is not syncing.
A folder Linbis has never synced has no mail in Linbis. Showing you 0 for it would be a lie — the folder may well have four hundred messages in it. So an un-synced folder does not get a count badge. It is marked as not synced, and where the provider tells us its own message count, that is the number you see, labelled as the provider's.
The same honesty applies at the other end. If a folder is so large that counting it exactly would mean an unbounded scan, the count comes back marked incomplete rather than quietly truncated.
If a number is missing or marked incomplete, that is deliberate. Linbis would rather show you no number than a confident wrong one.
Snippets and signatures
Snippets are the paragraphs you retype twenty times a week — your standard demurrage line, your document checklist, your "we'll revert with rates by end of day". Insert one into any reply.
Signatures are per mailbox, not per person. If you send from ops@ and from your own address,
each gets its own signature, because they are usually not the same sign-off and a single global
signature makes one of them wrong.
Composing, drafts and scheduled send
Reply, reply-all and forward all open the composer inline, with To/Cc/Bcc, attachments, and rich text. Forwarding carries the original attachments with it.
Drafts live at /freight-desk/drafts.
Schedule sends a message later — the Monday-morning follow-up written on Friday afternoon. A scheduled message can be listed, opened, rescheduled or cancelled before it goes.
Two safety properties are worth knowing. Undo gives you a short window to pull a message back after you hit send. And a scheduled send goes out through exactly the same send path as an immediate one, with the same exactly-once ledger — so a message cannot be delivered twice because a background job was retried.
Starring, Archive and Trash — and what "delete" means
You can star, archive and trash messages, individually or in bulk, and restore from either.
Here is the part that deserves plain language:
Delete in Linbis means move to your provider's Trash. It never permanently erases anything.
There is no expunge. No purge. No "delete forever". The capability does not exist in the system — not as a disabled button, not as an admin option, not as a flag someone could turn on. A message you delete in Linbis is a message you can still go and find in your provider's Trash folder, subject to your provider's own retention.
What is not finished yet — please read this if you rely on it. Today these actions change Linbis's view of the message. The machinery that pushes the same change back to Outlook or Gmail is built, is switched off by default, and its final provider step is not implemented — a message you trash or archive in Linbis is, right now, still sitting where it was in your provider mailbox. Marking mail as read has the same shape. Nothing is lost either way, and nothing is deleted from your provider, but the two views are not yet in step. Treat Linbis's Trash and Archive as Linbis's own filing until this is announced as complete.
Printing a thread
Any thread can be opened as a clean printable page — the whole conversation in order, without the application chrome around it. Useful for a file copy, a claim, or anything a customs broker wants on paper.
Reading mail in another language
A message that arrives in a language you do not read can be translated in place, in the reading pane, without leaving the thread.
Keyboard shortcuts
The list, the reading pane and the composer are all reachable from the keyboard, so a full triage pass does not require the mouse.
The honest limitations, in one place
We would rather you learn these here than discover them on a Friday.
- Provider write-back is not live. Read, trash, archive and move change Linbis's view only. The provider mailbox is unchanged. This is the single biggest gap on this page.
- Junk import is Gmail and Outlook only. IMAP arrives with folder discovery.
- Junk import on Outlook can duplicate a message that is later moved out of Junk in Outlook.
- Un-synced folders have no Linbis count, by design — see above.
- The assistant only ever sees mail you actually route to it. Junk, Trash and Drafts are not fed to it. Importing a junk message is the one deliberate exception, and it is always your gesture.
Related
- Emails screen reference — the Freight Desk inbox, classification chips and the Copilot rail.
- Freight Desk Workspace (v2) — the full-file view of a shipment.