Flow lifecycle and activation

A Flow is a saved Inbox filter plus one action: archive, move, or delete. Saving or activating a Flow never changes mail by itself.

Statuses

Status Meaning Mailbox effect
Suggested Doot created it for review None
Draft Saved, but not marked ready None
Active Reviewed and ready for manual runs None
Paused No longer marked ready None

Active means reviewed and eligible for attached schedules. Activation alone does not execute anything. Active Flows sort ahead of other Flows, and an enabled schedule may evaluate them at its configured time. Scheduled evaluations prepare proposals for review; they do not mutate the mailbox.

Activating a Flow

  1. Open its directly addressable /flows/:id page.
  2. Inspect the account, exact filter query, destination, and current cached matches.
  3. Edit the definition or ask Doot to refine it if necessary.
  4. Choose Mark active. This records enabled=true and status active; it does not create a proposal or contact IMAP by itself. It also allows any attached enabled schedules to evaluate the Flow.

Choose Pause flow to remove the readiness label. The definition and its manual preview remain available.

Scheduling a Flow

Add a once, daily, or weekly schedule from the Flow page. The first run is stored as an exact UTC instant together with the browser's IANA timezone. The scheduler checks persisted schedules every 30 seconds while Doot is running.

At run time, an active Flow searches the current cache and creates a bounded proposal. The run and proposal appear in History with status Needs review. No IMAP mutation happens until the user reviews and approves a mailbox action. If the Flow is paused, the scheduled evaluation is recorded as skipped.

Running a Flow

Running is always separate from activation:

  1. Choose Review & run to prepare a bounded batch of up to 100 current matches.
  2. Inspect the filter, action, account, count, and sample messages in the approval dialog.
  3. Choose Approve and run to create an audited proposal and apply that one batch.

The browser sends an explicit confirmation for this run. A later batch requires a new preview and confirmation, regardless of whether the Flow is active.

For delete actions, approval moves or deletes the reviewed messages according to the connected provider. For Gmail move actions, Doot applies the chosen custom label and removes Inbox as described in the Flow editor.