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.

Somra works with Gmail, including Google Workspace accounts. You can connect as many Gmail accounts (personal, work, client) as you like and manage them all from a single dashboard.

Usually moments after they arrive. Gmail notifies Somra in real time when new mail lands, and a backup sweep runs every 5 minutes, so nothing waits longer than that.

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.

In your rule you write labels wrapped in percent signs (e.g. %Urgent%), and Somra creates a Gmail label with that name (Urgent). The labels appear in your Gmail sidebar like any other label. Somra also adds an AI/Processed label so it never handles the same email twice.

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. Rules never send email. Sending only happens through Agents, an optional feature you set up yourself to send replies or forward emails for you. That's why Google asks you to grant send permission when you connect an inbox.

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 Slack channel, a private channel the Somra bot has been invited to, 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 build the style profile and are not saved. Only the resulting voice profile is saved with your rule. It describes your style and can include short example phrases taken from your emails, like your usual greeting and sign-off.

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

When sorting email, the AI sees a short summary of each file. When it writes a draft reply, it pulls in the full text of any file that's relevant, so replies are grounded in accurate facts about your business.

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

Up to 10 files per inbox, 10 MB each. You can attach a file to one inbox or make it available to all of them.

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 looks at the To and CC recipients of your last 200 sent emails. For each recipient it records their email address, display name, how often they appear in those emails, and the date you last emailed them.
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 adds your top 100 contacts to the AI's instructions and tells it that email from a known contact is much less likely to be cold outreach, sales, 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 automatic. You can turn off contact awareness for any rule on the Rules page. Viewing or editing the contact list itself isn't available yet, but it is on the roadmap.

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

• OpenAI — GPT-5 Nano (Budget), GPT-5 Mini (Standard), GPT-5.4 Mini (Standard), GPT-5.6 Sol (Flagship)
• Anthropic Claude — Haiku 4.5 (Budget), Sonnet 4.6 (Standard), Sonnet 5 (Standard), Opus 5 (Flagship)
• DeepSeek — V4 Flash (Budget), V4 Pro (Standard)

No. Every new account gets 500 free AI credits, which run on Somra's own GPT-5 Mini key. To use any other model, add your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepSeek API key in Settings. Without one, Somra uses GPT-5 Mini. When you use your own key, your provider bills you directly and Somra doesn't spend your credits.

Your API keys are encrypted using AES-256-GCM before being saved to the database, and they are never logged. They are decrypted on Somra's servers to make AI calls, and shown only to you, on your own Settings page.

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 your AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepSeek) is used solely to process your emails. Somra does not use your email to train any AI model, and does not share it with any third party for advertising or analytics.

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.