Frequently Asked Questions

Somra is an AI-powered email management tool that silently works in the background of your Gmail inbox. It automatically labels incoming emails, routes time-sensitive alerts to Slack, sends scheduled summaries, and drafts replies in your own writing style — all driven by plain-English rules you define.

It means Somra operates invisibly. You don't change your workflow — you still receive email in Gmail as normal. Somra just processes everything in the background without you lifting a finger.

Gmail is the primary supported provider. You can connect multiple Gmail accounts (personal, work, client) simultaneously and manage them all from a single dashboard.

The processing engine runs on a continuous loop, typically picking up new emails within 2 minutes of arrival.

The Rules Engine is the core of Somra. It reads each incoming email and runs it against a master prompt you write in plain English. Based on your instructions, the AI decides what label to apply (e.g. Urgent, Promotional, Cold emails), whether to archive the email, and whether to draft a reply.

You write your rule as a natural language prompt — like instructions to a smart assistant. For example:

• Define your available labels and what each one means
• Tell it when to archive vs. keep in inbox
• Tell it when to draft a reply and in what tone
• Add examples of tricky cases to improve accuracy

The built-in editor includes a default template to get you started, and you can customise it as much or as little as you like.

Somra creates labels directly in your Gmail account with the exact names you define in your rule (e.g. %Urgent%). You keep full visibility and control — the labels appear in your Gmail sidebar like any other label.

Yes. When you instruct it to draft a reply, Somra creates a Gmail draft — not a sent email. The draft sits in your Drafts folder ready for you to review, edit, and send. Somra never sends email on your behalf without your explicit action.

Yes. Each connected inbox has its own independent rule. You can run a professional prompt on a work inbox and a casual one on a personal inbox.

Once you connect Slack, you can create two types of routes per inbox:

• Time-Sensitive Alerts — trigger instantly when an email matching specific labels (like %Urgent% or %OTP%) arrives. The AI sends a formatted Slack message with the sender, subject, and a summary including any codes or action items.
• Scheduled Summaries — run on a schedule you define (e.g. every morning at 9am). The AI scans emails matching your chosen labels over the past N hours and sends a digest to a Slack channel.

You choose the destination when setting up each route — any public or private Slack channel, or a direct message to yourself or a teammate.

Yes, you can create unlimited routes per inbox — for example, an OTP alert route to your personal DM and a promotional digest to a #deals channel.

Summaries use the timezone you set in Settings. There is an Auto-Detect button that reads your browser's timezone and saves it automatically.

Brand Voice is an optional feature that teaches the AI how you write. When enabled, Somra scans your last 20 sent emails and extracts a style profile — your greeting style, preferred vocabulary, sentence length, tone, and signature patterns. Every draft reply the AI creates will then match your personal writing style instead of sounding generic.

No. Your sent emails are read once to extract the style profile and are never stored on Somra's servers. Only the resulting voice profile (a text description of your style) is saved as part of your configuration.

Yes. You can regenerate it at any time from the Rules page, or edit the extracted profile text directly.

Context Files let you upload documents that the AI should reference when drafting replies. For example:

• A pricing sheet, so the AI quotes the correct prices in replies
• A company FAQ, so the AI can answer common customer questions accurately
• Product documentation or a spec sheet

The content of these files is injected into every AI call for that inbox, giving the AI grounded, accurate knowledge about your business.

PDF, Word documents (.docx), plain text (.txt), and Markdown (.md).

You can upload multiple files per inbox. The combined content is injected as context on every processing run.

Contacts Awareness helps the AI understand who is emailing you, not just what they're saying. It builds a relationship map by scanning your sent folder and learning who you communicate with frequently.

The feature runs in three stages:

1. Discovery — When you connect an inbox, Somra scans your last 200 sent emails. For every recipient in the To and CC fields, it records their email address, display name, how many times you've emailed them, and the date of the last interaction.
2. Storage — These contacts are saved in your account (private to you, protected by row-level security). The sync repeats automatically every 7 days to stay current.
3. Injection — Every time a new email arrives, Somra fetches your top 100 contacts and adds them to the AI's system prompt. The AI is instructed: "If the sender appears in this list, treat them as a known, trusted contact — not cold outreach or spam."

Without relationship context, an email from a longtime client saying "Hey, quick question about the proposal" could look like a cold sales pitch to the AI. Contacts Awareness prevents that misclassification, making labels significantly more accurate.

The sync is fully automatic. Manual contact management (viewing, editing, or adding contacts) is not currently available in the UI, but it is on the roadmap.

Somra supports models from two providers, which you select in Settings:

• OpenAI — GPT-4.0 Mini (Budget), GPT-4.1 Mini (Standard), GPT-5 Mini (Standard)
• Anthropic Claude — Haiku 4.5 (Budget), Sonnet 4 (Standard), Sonnet 4.6 (Flagship)

During your 7-day free trial, Somra's shared OpenAI key covers GPT-4.0 Mini at no cost to you. After the trial, you'll need to provide your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key to continue. Anthropic models always require your own key — they are not covered by the trial.

Your API keys are encrypted using AES-256-GCM before being saved to the database. They are never exposed to the browser or logged anywhere. Decryption only happens server-side at the moment of an AI call.

Yes. Go to Settings, select a different model, and save. The change takes effect on the next email processed. You can switch back at any time.

Security is built into every layer of the platform:

No. Email content sent to AI providers (OpenAI or Anthropic) is used solely for real-time processing of your emails. Somra does not use your data to train any AI model, and does not share your data with any third party for advertising or analytics purposes.

Yes. You have full control:

• Disconnect an inbox — immediately deletes all OAuth tokens for that account
• Revoke via Google — remove Somra's access from your Google Account security settings at any time
• Delete your account — contact us at fernando.anselmi@gmail.com and all data will be permanently deleted within 30 days

Reach us at fernando.anselmi@gmail.com. We take all security reports seriously and respond promptly.