Basics & fundamentals

The basics

Parrot Mail is a client, not a new mailbox. You keep the addresses you already have — Parrot connects to each provider over its official API, reads your mail into a single unified inbox on demand, and labels every message as it arrives so the list you open is already sorted. No email is copied onto our servers; it stays where it lives and stays in sync.

Nothing is filed by rules you have to write. Categorization runs on the first message and tightens around your corrections over the following days. Everything else — search, drafts, calendar, tasks — reads from that same unified view.

Connecting accounts

Accounts are connected with OAuth from Settings → Accounts. Parrot never asks for and never stores your provider password; revoke access from your provider at any time and the connection drops immediately.

Supported providers

Gmail and Google Workspace, Outlook and Microsoft 365, and any server that speaks IMAP — Fastmail, Zoho, iCloud, or one you run yourself. Mixed setups are the normal case.

Host      imap.fastmail.com
Port      993
Security  SSL / TLS
Username  you@fastmail.com
Password  app-specific password

Sync reads your recent mail first so the inbox is usable in seconds, then works through history in the background — all of it pulled live from your provider, none of it stored here. Full detail on retention and encryption lives on the security page.

How sorting works

Each message is read once on arrival and tagged with a single category: work, finance, travel, social, updates, personal, or important. The tag drives the inbox grouping, the digest, and what Parrot considers worth interrupting you for.

Re-labelling a thread takes one keystroke, and your label always wins over the model's for that thread.

Your voice

Parrot writes as you rather than as a generic assistant. The first time you turn it on, it reads up to 50 of your own sent messages — stripping quoted replies and signatures — and measures thirteen things about how you write: your usual greeting and sign-off, how often you use either at all, your median reply length, your emoji, exclamation, contraction and bullet rates, your typical paragraph count, plus formality, up to four recurring quirks, and your language.

Ten of those thirteen are counted arithmetically, in plain code, with no model involved — which makes them exact and free. Only formality, quirks and language are inferred. A greeting or sign-off has to appear in 60% of your mail before Parrot treats it as a habit, so nothing is asserted from a single sighting.

It then keeps learning from you. When you edit a draft before sending, Parrot diffs its version against what you actually sent and reads the difference — greeting added or removed, sign-off added or removed, emoji, exclamations, contractions, shorter or longer. Those twelve corrections come in six opposing pairs, and a habit must be seen twice before it changes anything. Reverse yourself and the old habit is deleted rather than kept alongside the new one, so Parrot can never hold two contradictory instructions at once.

Everything lives in Settings under “Your voice”: a toggle to turn it off, the profile written out word for word exactly as Parrot receives it, the habits learned from your edits with a delete control on each, how often you sent a draft without changing a word, and a button to re-read your sent mail from scratch. It refreshes itself every 14 days. The voice applies to drafts, suggested replies and tone rewrites alike.

Search & shortcuts

Search takes plain language rather than operators. Ask for what you remember about the message and Parrot resolves the sender, the date range, and the attachment filter for you.

invoice from Stripe last month with a pdf
what did Sarah promise about the launch date
unread from my team since Monday

Keyboard shortcuts

Limits & quotas

There is no monthly quota on AI. Everything you ask Parrot for — drafts, tone rewrites, categorization, natural-language search — is unmetered on both plans. What the plans differ in is the work Parrot does without being asked: replies drafted the moment important mail arrives, and daily and weekly digests, are Ultimate only, as are unlimited connected accounts (Pro covers three). Reading, sending, and searching your own mail are never limited.

Fair use applies rather than a counter: requests are capped at 20 a minute and 300 an hour per account, which is far above normal use and exists so a runaway script can’t run up a bill. Hit it and Parrot answers

429

Retry-After

Current numbers per plan are on the pricing section, and the FAQ covers billing edge cases like mid-cycle upgrades.