Gmail and SLAtech Vantage: mail that reaches the right project

SLAtech Vantage connects to a Gmail mailbox through Google consent, with read-only access, and pulls messages and their attachments. Which project a message belongs to is decided by filter rules: an exact address or a domain, plus a direction. Text is extracted from attachments, and scans are recognized by OCR that runs on the SLAtech Vantage server, not in a cloud service.

How to connect: Google consent, not a password

There is no form and no key to type. The connection happens on Google's consent screen, and SLAtech Vantage asks for one permission: read-only access to mail. With that permission it cannot send from the mailbox, delete or change messages.

The permission is stored encrypted. If Google revokes it or it expires, the connections screen marks the mailbox in red, because at that moment the import has stopped. More than one mailbox can be connected.

Mailbox consent goes through us today: the Gmail connection screen is open to the system operator only.

Filter rules: what enters the project

The mailbox is not pulled whole. Each project gets rules, and each rule is one of these:

• An exact address, such as name@company.com;
• A domain, such as @company.com, which catches every address in it.

For each rule you choose a direction: mail from it, mail to it, or both. You can also set a start date, and older mail does not come in. When a message matches two rules, an exact address wins over a domain.

New mail is pulled every three minutes. There is also a list of subjects defined as noise, and a message with such a subject is not pulled.

Attachments, and scans read on our own server

Attachments are stored with the message. In a nightly run their text is extracted: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plain text and CSV. Images and scanned PDFs go through character recognition (OCR) in Hebrew and English.

OCR runs on the SLAtech Vantage server, not in a cloud service. Scans sometimes contain identity cards, and such a scan does not leave the server to be read.

A signature logo or a tracking pixel is recognized as decoration and not read. The extracted text goes into the project's knowledge base, next to the message it was attached to. A file in a format we cannot read is stored, but its text is not extracted.

What a message becomes, and what the customer sees

A message does not become a task on its own. From a message you can open a task in one click: the subject, text and sender prefill the form, and you can attach the whole thread and its files. A message can also be attached to an existing task, in the same project only.

The customer does not see the mailbox. Messages that entered the project by its rules are available to the portal chat, and a customer's question can get an answer that relies on them. So the rules also decide what the customer can find: a rule that is too broad brings in more than you meant.

Text sent to a language model has personal identifiers masked first.

What is not supported

• Gmail only. Microsoft 365 and IMAP mailboxes are not supported today.
• Read-only. SLAtech Vantage does not send mail from the connected mailbox.
• Google Calendar is not read, even when it is in the same account.
• No subscription to Gmail events. The mailbox is checked every three minutes, so a new message arrives within minutes, not instantly.
• A message that matches no rule is not pulled. There is no import of the whole mailbox "just in case".
• The count shown before an import is Gmail's estimate, not an exact number, and one message can match two rules.

Frequently asked questions