Mail you actually want to live in

This is a packed fortnight. I will keep it short and skip the plumbing. If something here changes how a part of your day works, that is the whole point.

Mail, properly

Our mail surface used to feel like a feature inside Native. From this release on, it is a place you can actually live in.

The window now keeps a persistent three pane layout: sidebar, list, reader, all mounted at once, no whole screen swaps when you open a thread. Replies open as a bottom drawer that you can drag up to about eighty five percent of the screen. Compose slides in from the right on desktop and as a full sheet on mobile.

A few things you will feel immediately:

1. Conversation threading on Gmail and Outlook. A whole back and forth now collapses into a single row with a count. Open it and the older messages sit as quiet cards above the latest one. Outlook threads stay together too, which they did not always do before.
2. Bulk select with a real toolbar. Hover a row, tick a checkbox, shift click for a range. Archive, trash, mark read or unread, star, snooze. One toast at the end summarising what happened.
3. Search chips. Type from:, to:, subject:, has:attachment, is:unread, is:starred, before:, after: and the chip promotes into a removable pill on space. Free text still debounces; chips fire immediately.
4. A real Snoozed view. It used to route you back to the inbox. Now it is its own view, hydrated with live metadata, and unsnoozing still works even if the original message has been deleted upstream.
5. Denser, quieter rows. Smaller avatars, a two pixel accent border on unread instead of a coloured dot, subject as the primary line, snippet as a single muted line. Less visual noise on a busy day.

The reply drawer got a tighter chrome with a drag handle, and the Cc and Bcc fields hide behind a small affordance until you need them. On a phone the whole layout reflows cleanly, the search popover stacks correctly, and a back to app button is wired up. Tap focus outlines that used to flicker on touch are gone.

The tour, on a phone, finally

The product tour now works properly on a phone. Instead of a desktop tooltip squeezed onto a small viewport, it docks as a full width bottom sheet on the opposite side of whatever it is highlighting. Forty four pixel tap targets. A backdrop that traps stray taps so you do not navigate away mid tour. The overlay listens to the visual viewport, so iOS keyboards and Android browser chrome retraction stay in sync with the spotlight.

A few smaller niceties:

1. One tap entry. A new question mark button in the mobile drawer header launches the tour. No more digging through the avatar menu.
2. Resume across reloads. Drop a tab and come back. You pick up where you left off. Manual launches always restart from step zero.
3. Reduced motion respect. If your device asks for less animation, the spotlight cross fades instead of sliding. The previous animation visibly stuttered on iOS Low Power Mode, which is exactly when you do not want stutter.

Tasks from everywhere you talk

Native used to do its best work in email and chat. As of this release, every channel you talk in is a first class source of tasks and insights.

1. WhatsApp groups and Slack workspaces produce tasks, not just insights. Action items in a group ("can you send the contract by EOD?") get extracted with the same confidence threshold and quote stripping that protect the email path.
2. Outlook backfill at Gmail parity. Ninety days back via incremental sync, with the same per user rotation and surface coverage we already had on Gmail.
3. Calendar events become meetings. Google Calendar events are upserted into the meetings table on every sync, so morning brief and predicted tasks are grounded in real meetings, not the rare ones that happen to be mentioned in chat.
4. Web scrapes feed the knowledge graph. Onboarding website scrapes used to land in context but skip the indexer. They now produce entities, relations, and chunks like every other source.
5. Meet transcripts ingested. Wired and producing extraction eligible content.

The single most useful side effect is source linking on every task. Each task carries a Mail, Message, WhatsApp, or Slack badge. One click takes you to the source inside Native, not back to Gmail or WhatsApp. We also ran a careful retro link migration on existing tasks: where there is an unambiguous nearest neighbour source within five minutes, the link is set; ambiguous matches stay null. No phantom links.

The marketing CTA defence that used to protect email is now active across chat, WhatsApp, and Slack too, with assignee equals sender as the strongest signal that something is a notification, not a task.

Talking to the founder, now on his phone

If you have ever sent Jasminder a note from deepnative.ai, you might notice the experience feels different now.

1. Direct push to his phone. Submissions trigger a web push to all of his registered subscriptions, including the phone PWA, alongside the email he was already getting. The push body shows your name and company plus a short preview, tagged so consecutive submissions do not pile up.
2. A success state that means something. After you submit, the widget addresses you by your first name, shows his live local time in Asia / Kolkata refreshed every minute, and commits to a reply by date (the next IST business day, with Friday and Saturday rolling to Monday). If he cannot write a proper reply by then, he will send a short Loom answering your question instead.

That is a change in posture, not just plumbing. The promise is concrete and time bound, and re opening the panel later in the same session restores the personalised state.

A handful of smaller things

1. Quick action create task flows through the same pipeline as everything else now: dedup, source linking, audit logging, all the same way. No more creating tasks via a side door.
2. AI Create Task from Mail carries the email id, thread id, provider, and snippet through to the new task as source metadata. The back link works out of the box.
3. Chat extraction strips quoted replies. Reply blocks, "On date, name wrote" markers, and forwarded message fences get cleaned before the model sees them. No more re extracting commitments from a quoted reply.
4. Paste to upload. Screenshots and files copied to the clipboard now attach with a single paste in the composer.
5. Native markdown and text extraction. .md, .txt, .csv, .json, .yaml, .log, and any text/* mime are decoded directly. We were silently dropping text/markdown before.
6. Attachment extraction restored. A helper deep in the stack was breaking TLS for binary downloads, and the failure was silent. PDF and Office extraction now work again.
7. File uploads no longer fail silently. Empty MIME types are handled, and the actual upload error surfaces in the UI when something does go wrong.

What you might have missed

A handful of things shipped quietly in the last fortnight that are worth a second look.

1. Talk to the Founder went live on May 6. A small floating launcher on deepnative.ai that puts you in front of Jasminder in two clicks. No tickets, no bots. The phone push and personalised success state above are the second iteration of this.
2. WhatsApp inbound is now resilient (May 6). The webhook used to reject messages where sender info, body, or group metadata showed up in an unexpected shape. It now extracts whatever is there. Renamed groups no longer split into a duplicate channel either; they stay on the same thread by their permanent identifier.
3. WhatsApp linking has a clean ceiling (May 5). Five groups per organisation, enforced server side, with a friendly error so nobody over links by accident.
4. The admin dashboard degrades gracefully (May 5). When the WhatsApp bridge is briefly offline, the linked groups list still loads from the database with a warning. Previously the whole page broke.

That is everything I think you should know from the last two weeks. If something here is unclear, or if you want more detail on any single piece, write back. I read the replies.

Gaurav