Importing your contacts

The first thing Speudio does with a new mailbox is scan it and show you who you write to. Nothing is imported until you press the button, and the scan reads only message headers, never what is inside them.

Simple or advanced

Simple makes one recommendation and gives you one button. It picks everyone you have heard from in the past year, newest first. Automated senders (receipts, newsletters, no-reply addresses) come along too. They are filed under Archive → Services and stay out of your contact list. Untick Include automated senders to leave them out.

Advanced gives you the full picker: a slider for how many, a search box, a row per person showing their message count and how much their files weigh, and switches for the people you have already imported and the automated senders. Whole conversations are always imported together. Speudio never stores half a thread.

The mode you pick is remembered, so if you prefer the picker you get it next time too.

Now and then a mail server hands over an address Speudio cannot read, usually a relay that folded a service name into the address itself. Those entries are skipped instead of stopping the whole import, and the wizard tells you how many were left out. If nothing in your selection can be read, Speudio says so and imports nothing, so an unreadable pick never turns into an import of the entire mailbox.

How much space your pick would take

Before you import, Speudio shows what your selection would cost against the one thing your plan limits: space, messages and attachments together. It is measured against the room you have left, not against the whole plan, so the figure already accounts for everything in your account today. The number of emails is shown beside it, because it is useful to know, and nothing stops at that number.

The email count is exact. The space figure is an estimate, worked out from the sizes your mail server reports for each message and each attachment, without downloading anything. It usually reads a little high: a file whose upload later fails is counted here and stored nowhere. A file sent to you five times counts once, the same way Speudio stores it once.

People you have already imported cost almost nothing to select again. Speudio checks every message against what it already has before it downloads anything, so mail you already hold is never fetched or counted twice. The meter therefore shows only what would be added: for someone already in your contacts, that is whatever has arrived since you last imported them. When your selection includes people like that, the panel says so under the meter.

Microsoft mailboxes work differently. Outlook and Microsoft 365 tell Speudio how big the attachments are, but not how big the messages themselves are, and your plan covers both. A figure built from the files alone would read lower than the truth, and reading low is what ends in a mailbox that fills up without warning. So a Microsoft mailbox gets no space estimate at all, with a line saying why, rather than a number Speudio cannot stand behind. The email count is exact on every mailbox, so you can still see the size of what you are picking.

What happens if you fill it up

Your plan holds a set amount of space, shared by your mail and your files. When Speudio is full, new mail stops being added until you free up space or move to a bigger plan. Your mailbox at Google, Outlook or wherever else you keep it is not affected. That is why the recommendation only ever uses about half the room you have left, and why the importer warns you before a selection would fill the meter. See Plan limits & what's kept for what each plan holds.

If a selection does not fit, the warning has a Get more room button that opens the plans on top of the importer. Each one says how much of the selection you are looking at it would take. Plans are paid by invoice, so write to info@speudio.com with the plan you want and we will set it up. Your picks are not touched, and the meters update as soon as the bigger plan is active, so you carry on with the same import instead of starting over.

How much of your AI it uses

Speudio reads every email you import, so you can search it and ask the assistant about it. That reading comes out of the same AI allowance as your own questions. A small import hardly shows. A big one can take most of it: a mailbox that fills your plan uses between half and all of it, depending on the plan.

When a selection would take a quarter or more, the importer tells you roughly how much. If it would use up what is left, it says that instead. The assistant then pauses until your AI starts fresh, every 30 days, and everything else keeps working. Nothing stops you importing. To keep some for questions, pick fewer people now and add more later.

Big imports are read a bit at a time, so a large mailbox can take a few days before all of it is searchable.

While it runs

A large first import takes a while, so you can close the window and keep working. A progress card in the sidebar keeps tracking it, and clicking that card brings the window back. You can pick up on another device as well: open Speudio on your phone and the same import shows up live. If something looks wrong afterwards, the finished screen has an Undo this import link that reverses the whole run.

Putting the window aside and stopping the import are two different things, and Speudio treats them that way. Clicking outside the window or pressing Esc puts it aside: the import carries on and the sidebar card brings it back. Stopping a run is the × in the window's own corner, and it asks first, because anything the run has already brought in is reversed.

Your contacts list stays exactly as it was while the import window is open, so nothing shifts around underneath while you are reading. The new people arrive together the moment you close the window, whether the import finished, was cancelled, or stopped partway. Close it early and you simply see whatever has landed so far.

While the import runs, the storage bar switches from the estimate to the real thing. Speudio knows the true size of every file as it saves it, so you watch the actual figure climb towards your plan's limit instead of a guess. The finished screen then says how much the files took, and names anything that did not make it: files too big to save, files that did not fit because your storage ran out, and files Speudio could not save at all. The first two are kept as greyed-out entries so you can see what is missing; if the third ever appears, importing those contacts again is the way to try once more.

When the counters read zero

Re-import people you already have and the three counters on the finished screen can all read zero. That is the honest answer, not a failure: nothing needed downloading. If Speudio was holding some of their mail without it being filed under them, the screen says how many messages it has now filed, and those messages appear in the contact straight away.

Speudio keeps each message once per account. So if a message is already stored in another of your mailboxes, it cannot be added to this one as well, and it stays where it is. The finished screen says how many were in that position rather than leaving you to wonder where they went.

Adding more later

Importing once is not a one-shot decision. Run the importer again any time to add more people, and Speudio keeps adding new contacts on its own as you send and receive mail.