Read my last email: how Raven connects to Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and GitHub

Type "read my last email" into Raven and it reads your last email. The real one, from your actual inbox, with the sender's name and the subject line. Two years ago that sentence would have sounded absurd. One year ago it would have sounded like a privacy nightmare. The gap between those two readings is pure architecture. This post walks through what actually happens between the prompt and your inbox.

How connecting works

Open Settings, then Connectors, then pick an app and press Connect. It takes two clicks, and we refuse to apologize for how uneventful that is. What shows up is the provider's own consent screen, the same one you have approved a dozen times elsewhere. It asks for read access to what the connector needs and nothing more. No API keys to paste, no JSON to upload, no "create an app" developer hoops.

We refuse to fake this part. A real consent screen makes the trust story write itself, and no amount of marketing copy can stand in for a missing one.

What the model can do with your accounts

Once connected, the data just shows up in normal conversation. Ask what is in your inbox from this week that actually needs a reply, and Raven triages your real Gmail. "When is my next meeting with Sam?" gets answered from your actual Google Calendar. Tell it to find the Q3 launch deck and it digs through Drive until the file turns up. And a request to summarize open issues on the payments repo reads the GitHub repo you meant, not one with a similar name.

The answer shows up in the same thread you were already talking in, with your data inside it. Tab switching is gone. So is the copy-paste relay from three different apps into one chat window.

The safety rails

Here is the part security people care about, so it gets its own section. Your credentials never enter the model's context. They live server-side, encrypted. When the model needs data, it does not receive your token and freestyle an API call; it invokes a narrow, allowlisted action with fixed parameters, and the server executes it. The model can ask for your last email through the approved door. It cannot open an unapproved one, and it cannot invent verbs that do not exist in the catalog.

Disconnecting is one click and kills the token immediately. Settings lists every connection along with what it can do. Remove one and exactly that goes away.

Where people start

Google goes first for most people, because the inbox and the calendar are where the daily pain lives. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Sheets all come along in one consent. GitHub tends to go second for developers. GitLab and Bitbucket show up too, and now and then Vercel or Cloudflare. From there it spreads out by need: planning tools, design tools, billing, error tracking, video calls, file storage, a bit of everything. Notion and Linear sit alongside Figma, Stripe sits alongside Sentry, and Microsoft 365 is in there too. Thirty-one native connectors in all, plus a marketplace catalog of over a thousand further apps.

If you want the thinking behind why this design works where ChatGPT plugins failed, we wrote that up in a separate piece on connectors vs plugins. If you just want your inbox read to you while you drink coffee, open the Raven app, connect Gmail, and ask.