Connect a mailbox and Point reads all of it. Not the last month, not the senders you have named in advance, not a sample it works up from. Every thread in there, including the one from four years ago about the joinery client’s overdraft, and every message that lands after.
That is the answer to the first of the six questions, and putting it in the opening line is deliberate. It is the part a supplier is most tempted to soften, and it is the part you would have worked out for yourself by the second week.
It also cannot be otherwise, which is worth understanding before it reads like a concession dragged out of somebody. There is no version of this where the software looks at the mail that matters and leaves the rest alone, because deciding what matters is the looking. A product that offered to read only your important messages would have to know which ones those were before it opened anything, and if it knew that, you would not need it. Sight is not a feature sitting on top of the ranking. It is the ranking, seen from underneath.
So the question people carry to the connect screen does not survive the first morning, and it was the wrong shape to be carrying. Three better ones sit underneath it: how far the reading reaches, what it leaves behind, and what it is kept away from. Those have edges, and a supplier can be held to all three.
What the connect button actually was
Nothing was moved. Point runs on top of the mailbox you already keep with Google or Microsoft, leaving the address and the plan exactly as they are, and changing client without changing account is the whole shape of it. No migration, no export, no new address to tell four hundred clients about.
What happened instead is that you granted a permission, and the permission is not held by Point. It is held by your mail provider, recorded against your account there, and it is listed on the same page as every other application you have ever let near it. Google’s own account help is plain about both halves: you can allow apps access to some of your Google Account data, and if you remove access, the app can’t access your Google Account (Google Account Help, checked 19 August 2026).
Read that twice, because it is doing more work than it looks like. The grant is revocable by you, at a company that is not the vendor, without the vendor’s cooperation and without anybody at the vendor knowing you are about to. It is the one fact in this entire subject you can verify while believing nothing you have been told, since the record of it is kept by the firm you were already trusting with eleven years of client correspondence. Everything else in this series is a supplier’s word, tested against documents. This part is not.
Point’s own privacy policy names what it takes at that moment rather than leaving you to picture it: provider account identifiers, addresses, tokens or token references, scopes, authorization status, sync state, and folder or label metadata (privacy policy section 3.3, version 1.0, effective 7 July 2026, checked 19 August 2026). Scopes is the word to notice. A scope is the shape of the key, written down by the provider in advance, and it is the reason this question has a factual answer at all.
One thing the connection is not, and the distinction gets blurred constantly in both directions. Your account not moving is a different fact from nothing being copied. The mail is read, and to be read at speed it is held, and what the supplier holds and for how long is a real question that keeping client data out of model training takes apart properly, retention clause by retention clause. What belongs here is only the first half of it: the mailbox is still yours, still where it was, and still reachable by every other route it always was.
Reading is not one thing
Ask what a piece of software can see and you get a list of nouns back. The useful version separates three things the one word is doing.
There is contact, which is a model passing over the text of a message. That is constant, it happens to everything, and it is the entire reason the product does anything at all. Nobody sells you a version with less of it.
There is reach, which is how far sideways the connection goes, and this is where most people’s picture is too small rather than too large. It is not just email. Point’s privacy policy sets the reach out as a list, and the first three items are the ones to sit with:
- emails, messages, threads, recipients, senders, headers, metadata, attachments, files, and folders;
- calendar events, invitations, availability, RSVPs, reminders, participants, meeting links, and scheduling pages;
- contacts, identities, relationships, circles, labels, and organization membership;
(Privacy policy section 3.4, checked 19 August 2026.)
The calendar is the item worth stopping on. People brace themselves for the mail and forget that the diary is attached to it, and a diary is a more revealing document than most correspondence: who you met, how often, how long for, and which week it stopped. It has to be there, because finding a slot for four busy people without the five-message thread is not possible from the mail alone. But it is a second consent hiding inside the first, and a supplier that lists it in a numbered clause is telling you before you ask.
Then there is residue, which is the part nobody pictures. Reading is not a beam of light passing over the page and leaving it as it was. It makes things. The same clause in the same policy runs on past what arrived into what was built from it: search indexes, embeddings, summaries, the tasks lifted out of a thread. A reader’s mental model tends to stop at item one, and half of what exists is further down the list.
You can read what it concluded
Here is the first thing in this subject that runs in your favour, and it is easy to miss because it arrives as a settings screen rather than as a promise.
Point forms views about your working life. That this sender outranks that one. That mail from a particular address belongs to the practice rather than the other venture. That when you write to a client on a Friday you sign off differently. Those views are how it gets better at the work, and they accumulate whether or not you ever go looking for them.
They are also written down where you can read them. The habits it has picked up are held as separate, named items you can open, correct or delete, and the ranking it applied to a thread sits on the surface of the thread rather than behind glass. What that gives you is unusual, and the comparison is with a person rather than with other software. A bookkeeper who has been with you four years has formed a hundred views about your clients, and you cannot read a single one of them. You infer them from behaviour, slowly, and you find out about the wrong one when it produces the wrong outcome.
Which speaks directly to the difficulty the last chapter left unresolved. A summary that missed the only sentence that mattered reads exactly like one that caught everything, so checking the output by looking at it is the move that fails. Checking what the software believes is a different move, and that one works, because a belief written down in plain words can be plainly wrong in a way a smooth paragraph cannot. If it has decided that a particular client is low priority, you can see the decision rather than wait for the consequence.
What it did, in sequence, with a way back from each step, is a separate record and a later chapter. This one is about what it thinks.
What it cannot see
Four blind spots, and only one of them is the sort you would set up yourself.
The first is deliberate and defensive, and it surprises people. A message from a sender Point has no history with does not get read at all. It waits at the door, in a quarantine you release from: not filed quietly, not summarized with a caution attached, simply left outside the reading. The reason is worth following, because it is the sharpest illustration of what reading means for software of this kind. To a machine that reads instructions, a message is instructions. A stranger who can get prose in front of it can try to tell it things, and the sentence in the eleventh paragraph of a plausible invoice can be addressed to the assistant rather than to you. Blinding it to unvouched senders is not caution about strangers. It is the recognition that here, reading and obeying are closer together than they are for you.
The second is a lane you open on purpose. A message locked end to end stays between you and the recipient, and Point cannot read it. The cost is stated rather than hidden, and it is the whole point of the mechanism: nothing sealed that way gets ranked, summarized, or turned into a task, because there is nothing to rank. That makes it a channel for the few things a year that need it rather than a way to run a practice.
The third is the wall between businesses. If you run the firm and something else besides, what sits on one side is not visible from the other, and the line is drawn between businesses you operate rather than between the clients inside any one of them. That distinction does more work than it appears to, and it gets a chapter of its own further on.
The fourth is the largest and has no setting attached. Point sees the correspondence. It does not see the practice. The call where the client actually told you what was wrong, the ten minutes in the corridor after the meeting, the thing you have known about that family since 2014 and would never put in writing: none of it is in the mailbox, so none of it is in the picture. Every judgment the software makes is made on the written record of a relationship, which is a partial and occasionally misleading document. The lines inside a practice that most need respecting are frequently the ones nobody ever typed, and whether client financial data is safe here works through what a firm does about that.
A blind spot is not neutral
The instinct on reading that list is to want more of it, and to go looking for the setting that draws the boundary tighter. Before you do, price it, because a blind spot is not free and it does not announce itself.
Something Point cannot see is something that does not get ranked. It does not surface at the top of the morning. It does not become a dated task because somebody asked for something in the third paragraph. It does not get pulled back to your attention in ten days when nobody has replied. The message simply sits there being ordinary, and nothing appears to tell you that nothing appeared.
Which is the failure you already have, reinstalled by hand. A thing that goes wrong by being absent gives off no signal at all, and it is the exact shape of the near miss that made you look at this category in the first place. Whatever the argument for a boundary is, it has to be good enough to be worth carrying that risk in the part of the mailbox it covers, and it usually is for a few messages and rarely is for a category.
So the boundaries are worth drawing deliberately and worth keeping few. It is the reverse of the reflex, which is to seal whatever feels heaviest, and heaviest is precisely where a silent miss costs the most.
Why this one goes first
Everything in this chapter has a door that opens both ways.
The permission can be withdrawn at your provider, and the reading stops. The account can be disconnected. What was made from the mail can be asked about, itemized against the terms, and deleted. Nothing here is a decision you are stuck inside, which is not a small property, and it is the honest reason this question leads rather than any claim that it is the least exposure. It leads because it is the one you can take back.
The next question does not have that shape, and the difference is the largest single fact in this series. A withdrawal reaches as far as your own building and stops. The moment something has been written and delivered, it exists on hardware belonging to somebody who has no obligation to you, and Point’s undo covers what Point did rather than what a recipient’s mail server now holds. Point puts a dial on how much gets to that stage and the full inventory sets out what sits behind it, but no setting anywhere retrieves a message that has already arrived.
Which is why reading was never the frightening half. What goes out is.