Your earlier replies are often the best help: how you handled the same question last time, what you already wrote to the customer. That is why the assistant may also search the mailbox's old mail — the archive.
What the assistant does in the archive
- Searches by topic across all senders: how you handled the same question for anyone else. It reads the whole conversation, not just one message.
- Reads the history with the customer who is writing now — as context only.
- Takes facts from your replies, not from what customers claimed.
From someone else's thread it never carries over names or details, only the procedure and the facts.
A source of the second order
The archive comes second. The knowledge sources come first — the help site, documents, notes you wrote. When a source and the archive disagree, the source wins and the assistant says so in the draft's reason. A fact it found only in the archive is named in the reason, with the date of the mail.
Settings
Switch the archive on or off in Knowledge, in the Mailbox archive card:
Search the mailbox archive — when it is off, the assistant does not touch old mail and answers only from the knowledge sources and the message itself.
Age of archive facts (days) — topic searches return only mail younger than this many days (365 by default). Older mail comes only when nothing younger exists, and the assistant takes it as a hint for the procedure, not as valid facts. The history with one customer is not limited.
When to switch the archive off
- The mailbox has a long history in which prices or procedures often changed, and you do not want the assistant reaching for old replies. Shortening the age of facts is often enough.
- The mailbox holds mail the assistant should not see.
During the check in the new-assistant wizard the archive is always off, so a draft cannot copy the reply it is compared with.