Store in AI

Store in AI is the part of Mail2Cloud Advanced that puts email into your organization's AI index, so users can search it with AI assistants through mxMCP. You turn it on per rule, and each rule writes to a scope: a separate area of the index. This page shows how to create scopes, turn on Store in AI in a rule, and check that email is being indexed.

Before you begin

• Mail2Cloud Advanced must be provisioned for your organization. It is in early access, and mxHERO sets it up on request. Until it is, the mxHERO AI tab in Settings › Integrations is missing and the rule option can't be turned on. Contact your mxHERO representative or support@mxhero.com.
• You need an Owner or Administrator role in the Admin Dashboard.
• The rule must store files in cloud storage. Store in AI runs only after the rule has stored at least one file successfully.
• Plan your scopes. You can't delete or rename a scope in the dashboard (see below).

How it works

Store in AI runs after a successful storage step and sends the email's text and file links to the rule's scope in the AI index.

For each email the rule stores, the AI index keeps:

• the sender, the To and Cc recipients, the subject and the date. Bcc and other headers aren't indexed.
• the thread identifiers (Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To and the Outlook conversation index), so whole threads can be found again;
• the body as plain text. Long quoted reply chains are trimmed: each email keeps its own text and the one message it directly quotes. Earlier messages are indexed when they are captured themselves.
• for each attachment that has readable text, its name and text: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF (text layer), RTF, HTML, plain text and DWG drawing text;
• one link to the email in your storage: the PDF copy of the email if the rule saved one, otherwise the saved email file. The PDF copy typically contains links to all the email's attachments, so users reach every attachment from that one link.

Attachment files themselves are not copied into the index, but their text is: a search can find an email by what its attachments say, and the result leads to the stored email and, through it, to the attachments. Attachments without readable text, such as scanned images and image-only PDFs, aren't indexed at all, not even their names. Nothing is read with OCR.

To make email searchable by meaning, the text is converted into numeric vectors ("embeddings") with OpenAI's embedding model. OpenAI does not use this text to train AI models.

The same email captured twice into one scope, for example from the sender's and a recipient's mailbox, is stored once.

Store in AI works with:

• Email Flow rules, as email passes through mxHERO;
• User Mailboxes rules, for email already in mailboxes, including past email;
• Drag and Drop rules, for email files dropped in a watched Box folder.

Scopes

A scope is a separate area of your AI index. Scopes keep data apart, for example HR mail from project mail. They also make answers more relevant, because each search covers less unrelated email.

Every organization has a scope named default.

Who can search a scope

mxHERO links each user's email address to one scope. Through mxMCP, a user searches all the email in their scope, whichever mailbox it came from, and nothing in other scopes. You can't assign scopes to users in the dashboard; send the list of users for each scope to support@mxhero.com.

Important: Everyone linked to a scope can search all the email in it, from every mailbox. There is no per-mailbox filter inside a scope. Plan scopes around who may see the email, not only around topics, and give mail that only some people may see its own scope.

Plan your scopes

• One scope per group of people who may see the same email, for example hr, legal-matters, project-atlas.
• Use short, lowercase names with letters, numbers and hyphens.
• Scope names aren't case-sensitive, and hyphens, underscores, spaces and other punctuation are treated as the same character. Don't create two scopes whose names differ only in case or punctuation, such as hr-team and hr_team: their email would be stored together.
• Don't put personal data in scope names.

Warning: You can't delete or rename a scope in the dashboard. Check the spelling before you save. mxHERO support can delete a scope, which permanently deletes all the email indexed in it.

Create a scope

1. Open Settings › Integrations and select the mxHERO AI tab.

   

   MxHERO AI Scopes lists your scopes. If there are more than 12, click Show all to see them all, and Collapse to shorten the list again.

2. Click Add a scope.

3. Read the message "mxHERO AI scopes cannot be deleted once created. Please review the changes carefully before proceeding."

   

4. Enter the name in Scope.

5. Click Save.

The new scope appears in the list and in the rule option.

Turn on Store in AI in a rule

1. Open Rules › Rules List and edit the rule, or create a rule with Rules › Create a Rule. Use an action that stores email in cloud storage, for example Copy Emails, Protect Attachments, Move Emails or Drag and Drop.

2. Complete the Cloud Storage and Storage Filepath steps.

3. Click Add Action to open More actions... (if it isn't already shown).

4. Turn on Process email using mxHERO AI.

   

5. Choose the scope. New rules start with default.

6. Save the rule.

From now on, every email this rule stores is also sent to the AI index in that scope.

Note: To index past email, use a User Mailboxes rule with a time range that covers it. See Rule Targets.

Decide what goes in

Only email that matches the rule is indexed. Use ordinary rule settings to control it:

Important: Users searching through mxMCP see only indexed email. If a rule doesn't capture a mailbox or period, it can't be found.

Verify

1. Send or process a test email that matches the rule.
2. In Reports › Email Flow Logs (Email Flow rules), open the email and check that the storage step succeeded and that Store in AI events follow it. For mailbox rules, check the rule's status in Rules › Rules List.
3. Check Reports › Notifications for store_in_ai_error.
4. Connect an AI assistant through mxMCP and ask about the test email. See Installing mxMCP.

Indexing doesn't happen instantly. Allow a few minutes after the email is stored. If the AI index can't accept email for a while, mxHERO keeps retrying for up to 5 days.

Indexing limits

• Long bodies are indexed in part. Only roughly the first 4,000 words of a message body are indexed. Attachment text is indexed up to a much larger limit.
• Only text is indexed. An email with no body text, no subject and no attachment text can't be indexed.

Troubleshooting

Removing indexed email

Turning off Process email using mxHERO AI stops new email from being indexed. It doesn't remove email already in the index, and deleting a file from your cloud storage doesn't remove it either. Indexed email stays until it is deleted.

mxHERO deletes indexed email on request. Contact support@mxhero.com and ask for one of these for a scope:

You can't set or change these yourself in the dashboard, and individual emails can't be removed.

How deletion by age works

• Age is measured from the date the email was sent, taken from its Date header. An email without a sent date is aged from when mxHERO indexed it, which is later, so it is deleted later, never earlier.
• Whole emails. An email and the text of its attachments are always deleted together.
• Daily. With a retention period, emails leave search within 24 hours of passing the period.
• The first deletion takes longer. When a new or shorter period would delete a large part of a scope at once, mxHERO checks it before deleting. Allow a few business days for the first deletion.
• Old email isn't indexed again. Once a retention period is set, email that is already older than the period when it arrives is discarded, for example when a mailbox rule or reprocessing captures it again.
• Backups. Deleted email stays in mxHERO's backups until those backups expire.

Deleted email stops appearing in mxMCP searches right away.

Related pages

• Mail2Cloud Advanced Overview
• Installing mxMCP
• Create a Rule
• AI FAQ