The mail that has no account left to connect
A company almost always keeps mail that no continuous connector can reach. The account of someone who has left was closed, and their mailbox now lives only in an export. A mail system swapped for another leaves nothing but a file on a disk. The archives of a generic address nobody opens any more sit in the same place.
That mail often holds what no document says, the reasons behind a choice, the history of a dispute, the commitments made to a long-standing client. It has no interface left to query, so it exists for an AI only if somebody drops the file in.
That is what this import is for, and it asks for no account, no authorisation and no access key. A file in the .mbox format, the one a standard export produces, is enough.
From the file to your Kastel, in this order
The order matters more than any single step taken on its own, because the order is what guarantees that no private message is written.
The file is read where your Kastel runs
No mail account is connected and no access key is kept for this source. The connector is handed a file path, and you can bound the import to the first messages to see what it produces before processing everything.
Three named rules drop the obvious mail first
An address or a domain you have put on your exclusion list drops the message. A correspondent on a personal webmail domain drops it too, unless that domain is also one of yours. And a mass mailing carrying an unsubscribe link, with no correspondent from your company at all, drops as well.
What is left goes through the model you have plugged in
The judgement covers the whole message, subject included, split into slices so that all of it is read. A slice that reveals private life drops the message, even when the rest is perfectly professional. With no model configured, the import refuses to start and nothing is read or written.
The messages kept are written with their provenance
Every message kept holds on to its sender, its recipients, its date, its subject and a marker saying no human has reviewed that content. It then goes through the same control door as a document dropped in by hand, so nothing enters by a back route.
The report gives numbers only
At the end you read how many messages were analysed, how many fell on the rules, how many fell on the model, how many came in, and how many attachments were ignored. Nothing of the content of a dropped message is written, anywhere.
A file does not know what has changed at your end
An export is a dated photograph, and the connector says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise. It holds no pass marker, it observes nothing, and it does not wake up at night to check whether your archive has moved.
Running the same import again adds nothing, because every message is recognised by its identifier and finds the copy already written. Two different messages carrying the same identifier do not overwrite each other for all that; the second is written beside the first and the collision is recorded.
Deleting a message in your mail client after the export changes nothing in the file, so nothing in your Kastel. The continuous connectors do flag a disappearance at the source on their next pass. Here there is no source to observe, and erasure is an administrative gesture rather than a side effect.
What the sorting keeps from your export
The scope of an import is described on the content of the file, since there is no account and no original permission to inherit.
The first two rules need no model and can be checked against your own lists. They exist because an old archive concentrates more personal mail than a live business mailbox, and because it is better to drop the certain cases before asking for a judgement.
What erasing a mailbox actually removes
This is the counterpart of the one-off import, and it is its best argument. Because everything coming from a file is attached to one identified mailbox, an administrator erases that mailbox in one go, without having to hunt down the notes it produced.
Every message copy written by that import is deleted. A note produced by a model whose only source was that mailbox is deleted along with them, because leaving the summary of content you have just erased would not be an erasure. A page that also cites other sources is not quietly altered, though; it is flagged for review.
The operation is recorded, and that is what makes it defensible to somebody asking where their data went. It is also what separates governing your knowledge from a spot of tidying up in a folder of files.
What this connector does not do
The import files the mail it keeps in the company's general knowledge. It does not try to infer a department from a message's correspondents, so what comes in through this door is the most widely readable content in your Kastel. For mail filed by person and by department, the continuous connectors are the right path, Gmail or Microsoft 365.
This is a one-off import rather than a synchronisation. Mail that arrived after the export is not in it, no pass will ever catch up with it, and refreshing means a new export followed by a new import. An Outlook .pst file is not read directly either; it has to be converted to the .mbox format first, with a tool off the shelf.
Attachments are counted and never opened. A contract that exists only as an attachment therefore does not come in through this door, even when the message carrying it is kept. The report tells you how many attachments were left aside, and it is for you to decide whether one of them deserves to be dropped in as a document.
You will know how many messages were dropped, never which ones. The report gives numbers only, and nothing of a dropped message is kept, neither its subject nor its correspondents. That is deliberate, and it also means you cannot review that sorting message by message in order to argue with it.
A mail archive deserves a conversation before an import.
Taking back the mailbox of someone who has left touches personal data, and the right decision depends on what you have to keep and for how long. Tell us the case and we will be precise about what the import produces and about what it leaves out.
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