Connect Gmail to Point and three labels appear in your Google account. Everything else in that account carries on the way it did this morning. Your mail stays where it is. Your unread count reads the same tomorrow. Your stars, your tabs and your filters keep doing what they’ve always done, and your storage quota holds steady. What does change is a short list, and you can read it in a minute.
- Three labels appear, named Now, Later and Other. They’re ordinary Gmail labels, and they’re the only things Point creates in the account.
- Unread is a label in Gmail. Taking it off is a separate write an app has to choose to make, so a backlog of four thousand unread messages is still four thousand the next morning.
- Your inbox tabs are labels too, held on the message at Google. Point’s ranking sits beside the tab, and both stay on the message.
- Your storage quota reads the same after you connect. Google’s quota counts the messages and attachments sitting in your mailbox, and Point writes label names onto messages that are already there.
- Two Gmail questions are worth settling before the afternoon you connect: who else already has access to this account, and who administers the domain.
Three labels and nothing else new
Start with what appears. It’s the visible part, and it’s smaller than people expect.
Point creates three labels in Gmail when you connect the account: Now, Later and Other. Every message Point has triaged carries the one it earned. So one click inside Gmail filters your real mailbox down to what needs you, with Point closed and nothing installed on the machine you’re sitting at. What those three names mean, and why the sorting is worth having in Gmail as well as in Point, is how Point uses your real Gmail labels.
Here’s the part that settles most of the worry. Those three labels are the whole of what Point makes. Point adds no folder, no filter, no forwarding rule, no sending address, and no calendar of Point’s own. Your drafts folder stays yours, because a reply reaches the mailbox when it’s sent, and it waits on Point’s side until then. A meeting time you settle inside Point becomes an ordinary event on the calendar you already keep.
One thing you already have does change. File a thread in Point and the message leaves the Gmail inbox. It’s archived, so it waits in All Mail with the rest of your mail, and you keep one inbox tidy, the one you already had. That write, and the traffic going the other way when you file something in Gmail instead, is filing in Point files it in Gmail too.
That distinction is worth holding on to, because it does more work than any reassurance. Creating and changing are two different things. Point creates three objects, and they’re the three labels. Everything else Point does to a Gmail account changes something Gmail already had a name for, in the vocabulary Gmail already uses. You can see all of it from the Gmail app on your phone the same afternoon.
Your unread count and your inbox tabs
Your unread count, your stars and your tabs are the three people worry about privately and ask about last. In Gmail, all three turn out to be the same kind of thing as each other.
Google’s own documentation sets out the mailbox’s vocabulary in a line: “Labels come in two varieties: reserved SYSTEM labels and custom USER labels” (Google for Developers, checked September 6, 2026). The reserved ones include UNREAD, STARRED and IMPORTANT, and one label for each of the inbox tabs: CATEGORY_PERSONAL, CATEGORY_SOCIAL, CATEGORY_PROMOTIONS, CATEGORY_UPDATES and CATEGORY_FORUMS (same page, checked September 6, 2026).
That’s a technical page carrying a plain answer. Unread is a label the message wears until an application takes it off. Taking it off is a write, and an application has to choose to perform it. Reading and marking read are two different acts in Gmail, so a decade of unread mail comes through a connection with its count intact. What a connected app writes into a Gmail mailbox is a short and public list, and your backlog stays where it is. The whole of that list, in one place, is what an email app writes back into your mailbox.
Your stars sit in the same position, and they’re worth a sentence of their own, because they usually mean something specific to you. A star is a label you applied by hand, for a reason that’s yours. Point’s ranking is a separate judgment, stored separately, so a message carries both at once. A message in a Gmail mailbox holds as many labels as it earns.
The tabs are the interesting case, because a Gmail user who relies on them is usually half expecting a new app to trample them. Your tabs come through it. Google describes Primary as holding “Emails from people you know and messages that don’t appear in other tabs”, and Updates as holding “Automated confirmations, notifications, statements, and reminders that may not need immediate attention” (Gmail Help, checked September 6, 2026). Each of those is one of the category labels above, held on the message at Google, and a message filed under Updates stays under Updates.
It stays there because the two systems answer different questions. A tab tells you what kind of thing a message is. Point tells you whether it needs you today. Your bank’s monthly statement is an Update on both readings, and both readings are right. A one-line reply from a client agreeing to a fee change is Primary in Gmail and near the top in Point. The gap between those two descriptions is most of the reason to connect anything at all, and that gap, argued properly, is Point vs Gmail alone.
What the connection costs you in storage
Few people ask this before connecting and a fair number worry about it afterward, usually the ones already living near the ceiling.
Google’s terms are public and simple. Each Google Account “includes up to 15 GB of storage, which is shared across Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos”. Gmail’s share of that number counts “Gmail messages and attachments, which includes your Spam and Trash folders” (Google One Help, checked September 6, 2026).
Look at what that counts. Messages, and the files hanging off them, sitting in the mailbox. Point reads the ones already there and writes label names onto them. A label name is a word attached to a message that Google was already storing and already counting. The quota you have today is the quota you have on Friday.
A copy of your correspondence lives on Point’s side. That’s a real thing and a fair question, and it’s a question about Point rather than a Gmail storage number. What’s held, and where the key to your account sits, is where your email credentials are kept. How long any of it lives, and the one thing it’s never fed to, is keeping client data out of model training.
There’s one thing this section leaves where it found it, and it’s worth naming rather than implying. If your account is already close to full, it was already close to full this morning, and a decade of attachments is why. Connecting Point leaves that number where it is.
Who else already has a key to this mailbox
For a firm of five to fifteen people this is the section that changes plans, and it’s a Gmail question from end to end.
Plenty of owners share their mail with somebody. Google’s word for the arrangement is delegation, and Google describes it plainly. A delegate is “someone who can read, send, and delete emails in your account for you”, with a stated limit in the same place: “A delegate can’t chat with anyone or change your password” (Gmail Help, checked September 6, 2026).
If your office manager works your mail that way, that arrangement sits between two Google accounts and it carries on as it is. In Point, a colleague works alongside you on a seat of their own. Two people, one pile of mail, and who’s holding which thread is running a firm from one inbox.
The other case is the address everyone in the office answers. An info@ or accounts@ address comes in two shapes. It’s either a mailbox with a sign-in of its own, or an address that fans out to several real mailboxes, and which shape you have decides what can be done with it. The first kind is the one anybody can connect by signing in. Which one you have is usually a five-minute answer, and occasionally a surprise. How to switch to an AI email client works through the shared-address cases along with your signature and your other sending addresses.
Then there’s the domain. If your address ends in your firm’s name rather than in gmail.com, somebody administers that Google Workspace, and Google gives that person settings that decide whether a given application may reach the organization’s data at all. Often the administrator is you. When it’s somebody else, this is one email to send before you plan an afternoon around connecting. The four settings they’ll be choosing between, in Google’s own words, are set out in connecting Gmail to another app without changing a thing.
A second business and a personal address
Most owners have more than one Google account. What happens to the second one depends on what it’s for.
A second business stays a second business. Point keeps each one sealed off from the others, so what belongs to one stays inside it, and the sorting inside each one happens with that separation already in place. What that isolation covers, and where it stops, is keeping two businesses apart.
A personal gmail.com address is a different shape of problem, because the two piles are one life. Point places a message in whichever area of your life it belongs to, so a personal account and a work account share one feed. The school newsletter lands with the weight of a school newsletter, and a client lands as a client. Everything Point does is the full inventory behind that, and the ranking is the same ranking either way.
Both cases are ordinary connections against ordinary Google accounts. You grant each one separately, on the account it belongs to. End one, and the other carries on.
What Gmail still holds if you stop
This is the honest half of keeping everything, and it’s the half a vendor usually leaves out.
Gmail holds a name against a message, and a name is all Gmail was built to hold. So the three labels travel, and the thinking behind them stays in Point. That thinking is the plain summary sitting on each thread before you open it. It’s the ask lifted out of a paragraph and turned into a dated task. It’s the log of what Point did on your behalf. And it’s the setting that governs how far Point may go on each kind of work. Gmail has a slot for the names, and Point keeps the rest. That setting is worth finding early rather than late, and what each position on it actually permits is setting how much your inbox does on its own. It arrives on review, per kind of work, which means Point prepares and you approve until you move it.
So here’s what your account looks like if you ever end the connection. The three labels stay, as ordinary Gmail labels on ordinary Gmail messages, and anybody who has never heard of Point can read them, rename them or delete them. Mail Point filed is still archived, because archiving in Gmail was only ever the removal of a label. Your address, your history, your contacts and your filters were sitting in Gmail all along. What stops is the layer: the ranking, the summaries, the tasks. That’s a real loss, and it’s a clean one, because it leaves everything of yours where it is.
Which is a fair description of the whole arrangement, and the reason this page is short on reassurance. Everything of yours stays where it is from the first day, and that’s why it’s all still there on the last one.
Common questions
Does connecting Gmail move any of my mail?
Your mailbox stays at Google, on the same account and the same plan, and Point reads it where it sits. The one thing that changes position is a thread you file in Point. That thread leaves the Gmail inbox and waits in All Mail, exactly where it would sit if you’d archived it in Gmail yourself.
Will my unread count be cleared when Point reads my history?
Your count reads the same as it did before. In Gmail, unread is a label the message carries, and removing that label is a separate write an application has to choose to make. Point writes two things into a Gmail mailbox: the three triage labels, and the filing when you put a thread away. Your backlog is still your backlog in the morning.
Do the labels Point creates show up in the Gmail app on my phone?
Yes, and nothing gets installed on the phone. They’re ordinary Gmail labels held on the account itself, so they appear wherever you already read that account. This is the check worth doing on the first day. Open Gmail on your phone, and the same Now, Later and Other are sitting in the label list.
Does connecting Gmail use up any of my Google storage?
Your quota reads the same afterward. The 15 GB shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos counts messages and attachments held in your mailbox, and Point writes label names onto messages Google is already storing and already counting. If your quota is uncomfortable, that’s a mailbox-size problem you had before Point and will still have after.
Can I connect a Gmail account that somebody else administers?
Only if they allow it. An address on your firm’s domain sits inside a Google Workspace, and the administrator of that Workspace has settings governing which third-party applications may reach the organization’s data. If you administer it yourself, the answer is yes. If somebody else does, it’s one message to them before you set aside the afternoon. More connections are delayed by that one unasked question than by anything else on this page.