Obok

Obok is a draft-only email assistant for people who run small businesses. It reads your Gmail to find unpaid invoices and unanswered scheduling requests, writes the reply for you in your own voice, and never sends anything — you press send yourself, in your own mail app.

The replies you keep putting off, already written.

Obok never sends email. Not "doesn't by default" — it never asks your mail provider for permission to send, and a connection that arrives carrying send permission is refused. It opens a pre-filled compose window in your own mail app. You read it, change it if you want, and press send yourself.

What it actually does

Reads your mailbox for the last 60 days, looking for two kinds of thread: an invoice that has gone quiet, and someone asking to meet.
Writes a draft in your own tone, matched to how you have written before — a gentle nudge at ten days, a firmer one at thirty.
Shows you a card with the full draft. Never a summary you have to trust; the whole text, before you decide anything.
Waits. Approve and your mail app opens with the draft loaded. Edit it first if you like — your version is what travels. Reject it and say why, and that reason becomes a rule it follows next time.

What Obok does with your Google account

Obok connects to Gmail and Google Calendar, and asks for exactly two permissions — both read-only:

Permission	What Obok uses it for
`gmail.readonly` See your email messages and settings	Read threads from the last 60 days to find invoices that have gone unpaid and messages asking to meet, and to match the tone of your own past replies.
`calendar.readonly` See events on your calendars	Work out which times you are genuinely free, so a scheduling reply can offer slots that actually exist.

Obok requests no permission to send, modify, or delete anything in your mailbox or calendar — and a stored connection found to carry one is refused rather than used. That is what "draft-only" means here: it is enforced by the permissions we never ask for, not by a promise about how we behave.

What is stored, how long, and who else sees it is set out in the privacy policy.

What it remembers, and how to see it

Everything Obok has learned about how you work is written in plain language, in one list you can read. Not an opaque model of you — sentences like "never propose meetings before 10am". You can edit any of them, switch any of them off, delete them, or export the whole lot as JSON. A rule Obok guesses at stays inert until you confirm it.

There is a single switch that stops it proposing anything at all, plus finer ones per task type and per connected account.

What it is not

Not autonomous. Every action needs your tap. There is no setting that lets it act on your behalf while you sleep.

Not a mailbox replacement. It sits beside the mail app you already use — Gmail today, Outlook next — and hands work back to it.

Not finished. Obok is in supervised testing with a small cohort. Everything it currently does badly is written down in public, before anyone has to discover it.

The honest part

To find your overdue invoices, Obok needs to read your mailbox — and mail permissions are all-or-nothing, so the access you grant is broader than what it uses. It reads only the last 60 days and keeps only what matches an invoice or a scheduling question, but that is our restraint, not a limit the permission imposes.

The text of the threads it works on is sent to Anthropic's Claude to write the drafts. It is not used to train anything. Your mail connection is stored encrypted on our server rather than on your phone, which is where it should eventually live.

All of that, and the rest of it, is in the privacy policy — and in more detail than most products would print.

Access is by invitation. Obok is not open for signup. If you have a link, it identifies you on its own — there is no password to create and no account to recover. Treat it like a key.