One inbox for Gmail, Outlook, iCloud and the rest

A unified inbox is a view, not a migration. Your Gmail stays Gmail. Your Fastmail stays Fastmail.

What changes is the number of places you check. All of them arrive as one list, sorted, with the account name on every row.

What the list holds

Every connected mailbox, merged by time. Each message carries a small tag with the mailbox it came from.

The tag follows the message everywhere: the row, the open thread, search results, Ask Zero's citations. You always know which identity a message belongs to and which one will reply.

Above the list are two tabs, Needs you and Other. The triage layer sorts each message into one of them as it lands, across every account at once. Needs you isn't only replies: a reply arrow marks the threads waiting on an answer, and an eye marks the ones you just need to read.

You can add more. + Add split turns any of your labels into its own tab beside them, like Money, a client, or a project, and Manage labels makes new ones.

One login covers the lot. Sign in on the web, the desktop app or Android and the same connected set is there, with the same tags and read state.

How each provider connects

There are two paths.

Provider	How it connects	What you give us
Gmail, Google Workspace	Google's consent screen (OAuth)	A revocable token. Never your password
Outlook.com, Microsoft 365	Microsoft's consent screen (OAuth)	A revocable token. Never your password
Fastmail, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, GMX, Web.de, Zoho, Yandex, Mail.com	An app password you generate at the provider	That password, encrypted with its own key, deleted when you disconnect

We prefer the OAuth path, and so do Google and Microsoft. You approve a listed set of permissions on their screen, you can see us in your account's connected apps, and you can revoke us there without asking.

The app-password path exists because we reach those nine over IMAP, and an app password is what they hand a third-party mail client. You generate one for this app, hand it to us, and revoke it at the provider whenever you like.

We refuse a Gmail or Outlook address on the app-password path and send you to the consent screen instead. There's no reason to hold a password when a token will do. The per-provider steps are in the connect guides.

What stays where

Your provider keeps the mail. Attachments never leave it.

We keep what the features need: subjects, senders, recipients, labels, timestamps, previews, the AI's verdicts, and the search vectors built from them. Plus the things you make here: drafts, queued sends, your conversations with Zero.

Message bodies are read from the provider when you open a thread and held in an encrypted cache for about ten minutes. The full list of what we store is on the security page.

On first connect the last three days are triaged while you watch, then the last two weeks are pulled and sorted, then history fills in behind: up to twelve months on a paid plan, three on the trial. All of it is searchable; the most recent three months are also tagged.

How new mail arrives

By push, where the provider offers it. Gmail sends a notification, Microsoft a subscription event, and a reconcile pass runs under both as a backstop.

Every IMAP mailbox is polled instead, every five minutes: Fastmail, iCloud, Zoho, Yahoo and the rest. We say "instant" about Gmail and Outlook, not about IMAP.

Writing back

Archive, trash, read state and stars sync both ways. When you mark a thread Done or Not for me, a MorningZero/Done or MorningZero/Not for me label is added at your provider, so the decision shows in Gmail or Outlook too.

Your other labels and Zero's tags stay here unless you switch on label write-back for that mailbox. It's off until you turn it on. Nothing is sent without you pressing Send.

What this doesn't fix

What arrives is the same. What you have to read is less.

If you have one account and the Gmail app, you don't need this. With two, what Gmail and Outlook already combine may be enough. If you have several, the morning usually goes: open one list, go through Needs you, reply from whichever address the thread belongs to.