The email inbox

Clarify gives every Pro and Agency workspace its own email address for threats. When an abusive or threatening email lands in someone's inbox, they forward it to that address and it appears on the Email page a minute or two later, classified, with the original sender recorded in the Account Tracker next to their social accounts. Nothing is sent back to the sender, and nothing is reported anywhere on your behalf.

What to forward, and what not to

The address is for one thing: abusive, threatening or otherwise harmful emails your office receives. Do not send anything confidential or sensitive to it. Ordinary constituent, client or customer correspondence, health, financial or legal matters, and anything you would not want stored and analysed like a public comment should never go there. You choose what is forwarded, and the same goes for everyone you approve.

Your address

Owners and admins find it in Settings > Email inbox. It reads like your workspace, for example harbour-alliance@threats.clarify.net.au. You can rename the part before the @ if you like; the old address stops working the moment you do.

The address is not a secret and does not need to be. What keeps strangers out is who may send to it, below.

Who may forward

• Members of your workspace are approved automatically. Their sign-in email was confirmed when they joined.
• Anyone else has to be added by an owner or admin and then confirm their own address. Clarify emails them a link; only the person holding that inbox can click it, and it works once. Until they do, their mail is held.
• There is deliberately no "approve everyone at our domain" option, so nobody can be opted in without agreeing.

Every email is also checked against the standard sender checks (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), which show whether it really came from the address it claims. An email that fails them is held even when the address is approved, because a From line on its own is easy to forge.

Forward as an attachment when you can

An ordinary forward pastes the original email into a new one, and Clarify reads the sender, date and subject from the quoted headers. That works for Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail almost always. Forwarding as an attachment sends the original intact, headers and all, so nothing is lost and the sender's email provider gets exactly what it needs if you later report it.

• Gmail (on a computer): go back to the inbox list, tick the box next to the email, then click the three dots in the toolbar above the list and choose Forward as attachment. Gmail does not offer it inside an open email, and the Gmail phone app does not have it at all, so forward normally from a phone.
• New Outlook and Outlook on the web: open the email, click the small arrow next to Forward and choose Forward as attachment. If you don't see the arrow, use the three dots, then Other reply actions, then Forward as attachment.
• Classic Outlook (desktop): select the email, then Home > More > Forward as Attachment, or drag the email into a new message.
• Apple Mail: select the email, then Message > Forward as Attachment.

If Clarify could not read the original sender, the email shows Sender not read and whoever forwarded it stands in as the sender. Open it and type the sender in by hand, and ask the forwarder to use an attachment next time.

The Email page

The Email page lists what has arrived, newest first, with the category Clarify gave it. Open an email to see the full text (and a formatted view with images, links and styling stripped out), who forwarded it, the sender checks, any attachments with their hashes, and a download of the original message file.

From there you can:

• Treat as a threat. The email shows red and the sender's account is flagged, whatever the classifier said.
• Open the sender in the Account Tracker. Their emails and any linked social accounts sit together. Clarify suggests "same person?" links when an email sender's name matches an Instagram, TikTok, Threads, X or Bluesky commenter.
• Add it to a case, or open a new case on the sender with the email as its first evidence. The case report and its eSafety annex include it, and the reporting checklist's platform step becomes "report to the sender's email provider".
• Mark reviewed, dismiss, or mark as spam. Dismissed and spam emails are kept for the record and can be put back.

A threatening email raises the same alert as a threatening comment: in-app, and by email to anyone who has that alert turned on in Settings > Alerts.

Held mail

Owners and admins see a Held tab. It holds mail from addresses that are not approved, and mail from approved addresses that failed the sender checks. Nothing in it has been classified or tracked. You can approve the sender, which marks the address as verified and releases every held email from it, or delete the email. Anything left is removed after seven days.

Where emails are kept

Each forwarded email is stored exactly as it arrived, with its attachments and a SHA-256 hash, so you can show a file is unchanged since it came in. Emails are kept on the same terms as comments and are included in a workspace's data deletion. Attachments are stored and hashed but never opened; images can be previewed, everything else is a download.