Integrations4 min read

Connecting Gmail

Connect Gmail to Symbi so your agents can read, draft, and send email on your behalf.

Two Ways to Use Gmail

Gmail is one of the few integrations that works on both sides of Symbi:

  • Personal Assistant — your own inbox. Your Personal Assistant can read, search, send, and archive mail as you
  • Company agents — a shared team mailbox for an agent (e.g., a support agent that handles support@yourcompany.com)

Each person's personal Gmail is isolated — teammates never see each other's mail, and Admins don't have access to the content of personal mailboxes.

Personal Gmail Connection

  1. Open Settings → Personal → Connectors
  2. Find Gmail under Available to Connect and click Connect
  3. You'll be redirected to Google to authorize
  4. Review the permissions (read, send, draft, labels) and click Allow
  5. You're returned to Symbi with the connection confirmed

Your tokens are encrypted and scoped to your user account only.

Company Gmail Connection

  1. Open Settings → Connectors and click the Gmail tile
  2. Click Connect with Gmail
  3. Sign in to the Google account for the shared inbox (e.g., support@yourcompany.com)
  4. Authorize the permissions
  5. Symbi redirects you to a page listing the mailbox and your user-created Gmail labels on the account — built-in labels like Inbox or Sent aren't offered as separate choices. Select the labels you want your agents to be able to use as filters or routing targets and click Register selected
  6. Choose whether agents should monitor the mailbox you just authorized or a different, delegated mailbox — type its address if it's delegated. Google Groups addresses aren't supported; forward the group to a dedicated mailbox instead
  7. The inbox and registered labels are now available to your company agents

You can skip the label selection step and manage label registrations later from Settings → Connectors → Gmail.

Only Owner and Admin users can connect a company Gmail account.

What Your Agent Can Do

Once connected, a company agent can:

  • Send Reply — draft and send replies to a thread
  • Apply / Remove Label — organize messages automatically
  • Get Message / Get Thread — read a specific message or full thread
  • Search Messages — find messages by keyword, sender, or date (opt-in)
  • Send New Email — send a new outbound message (opt-in)
  • Create Draft — draft without sending (opt-in)
  • Create Label — create a new label in Gmail (opt-in)

Opt-in actions are off by default. Enable them per agent from the What it does section on the agent's page.

Real-Time Updates

Symbi uses Google Cloud Pub/Sub to receive message notifications in real time. Your agent or Personal Assistant sees new email the moment it arrives — no polling delay. Setup is automatic; no additional Google Cloud configuration is required from you.

Connection Health

Symbi watches your Gmail connection for delivery problems:

  • If Gmail stops notifying Symbi about new mail, Symbi automatically falls back to checking the mailbox every 5 minutes instead — mail may arrive a few minutes late. The Gmail card in Settings → Connectors shows Arriving late while this is happening.
  • If the connection needs to be reconnected — access was revoked, or a token refresh failed — the Gmail card shows Not receiving, a banner appears across the dashboard (Owners and Admins see a link to reconnect), and for a company connection your Owners and Admins also get a one-time email. You'll only get one email per problem; it stops once the connection works again. A personal Gmail connection shows the card and banner but sends no email.

Reconnecting uses the same steps as the initial connection above.

Security and Scopes

Symbi requests only the Gmail scopes it needs — reading messages, modifying messages (labels), sending, creating drafts, and managing labels. Tokens are AES-256 encrypted and decrypted only when needed to call the Gmail API.

You can revoke access at any time from Settings in Symbi, or from your Google Account security page.

Tip

If you're trying Gmail for the first time, connect your personal Gmail and ask your Personal Assistant to "summarize my inbox this morning" — it's a fast way to see the integration in action without affecting shared team data.

Tip

When setting up a Gmail-based agent via your Personal Assistant, you can identify a Gmail label by its display name (e.g., Support Tickets) — no URL required. The builder resolves the name to the correct label automatically, case-insensitively.

What's Next?