Update
Update — Faster search, Sent folder, and clear errors
A polish release that straightens out three rough edges: search is dramatically faster on classic IMAP providers, sent mails now show up in the sender's Sent folder, and when something does go wrong you get a readable message with a traceable ID instead of a cryptic stack trace.
Dramatically faster search
Until now, every search scanned the subject and the full message body. On modern providers like Microsoft 365 that's essentially free — there's a server-side full-text index. On classic IMAP servers like Strato or many shared-hosting mailboxes that index doesn't exist: the server has to read every single message, which on a folder with thousands of mails easily takes minutes — and the assistant times out before the answer arrives.
From now on the assistant searches the subject only by default. That's the case ~90 % of user questions actually mean ("show me the mail from the accountant last week"), and it's blazing fast on every provider. If you really need to find something in the body — an order number, a phrase from a reply — you tell the assistant, and it opts into a full-text search.
There's also a new date-window filter. The assistant can now search "only in the last 30 days" or "between June 1 and June 15" — on the IMAP side that maps to the classic SINCE/BEFORE commands, which most servers use to skip large chunks of the mailbox entirely. Combined with the full-text option this is the door-opener: "search the body for invoice number 42731, only the last 30 days" finishes in seconds even on Strato, where an unbounded body search would never have made it through.
Sent mails in the Sent folder
A small bug with big impact: when the assistant sent a mail through a classic IMAP+SMTP mailbox, the recipient got it fine — but it never showed up in the sender's own Sent folder. In Apple Mail and Outlook it looked like nothing had been sent, even though the mail was on its way.
Reason: SMTP knows nothing about a "Sent" folder — copying the outbound message there is a separate action, traditionally handled by the mail client itself. The assistant now does that automatically. Microsoft 365 was always fine (Graph handles the copy server-side); the fix only affects classic IMAP mailboxes.
"Mailbox in use elsewhere" — automatic retry
Some IMAP providers — most notably Strato — allow only one active session per mailbox. When your phone's Apple Mail is holding an IDLE connection open, both sides compete for the same slot. Previously this left the assistant staring at a cryptic MailKit error message.
The assistant now tries three times automatically with a short back-off — that's enough in most cases. If it's still stuck after that, the assistant gets a clear message with the name of the affected mailbox: "Mailbox 'Mia VINCENT' is currently in use by another session and the mail server blocks concurrent connections. Close other mail clients on this mailbox (Apple Mail, Outlook, mobile mail apps) and retry." That way it can tell you exactly what to do.
Errors with a traceable ID
Whenever anything unexpected does go wrong, the assistant now gets a structured answer with three ingredients: a plain-English explanation, an error code for our support team (e.g. imap_busy, imap_readonly, queue_timeout), and a correlation ID. Copy that ID into a support ticket at hi@inboxmcp.io and we find the matching log line in seconds rather than minutes. No more cryptic stack traces, no more "something went wrong".
What's next
Up next: the remaining classic mail verbs — mark as read, flag with a star, move to trash. In parallel we're looking at streaming progress notifications for long operations, so that even searches that come close to the 60-second tool-call ceiling can complete cleanly.
As always, we'd love your feedback: hi@inboxmcp.io.