Pipe more of your world into Deck

The Email Assistant reads everything that arrives at your assistant address. Anything that can send email can talk to Deck — that includes scripts, cron jobs, webhooks, no-code tools, and Claude itself.

This section is for people who want to go beyond "I forward emails when I remember to." The pattern is the same every time:

1. Something happens (a clock tick, a Calendly booking, a CRM update).
2. A small script or service builds a short message.
3. It sends that message to your assistant address.
4. Deck files it, queries against it, or both — exactly as if you'd written it yourself.

What's in this section

Page	When to read it
Auto-forwarding from Gmail & Outlook	You want mail you already receive to flow into Deck automatically, with no manual forwarding.
Scheduled snapshots via cron	You want a script to email Deck a Google Calendar, HubSpot, or newsletter snapshot on a cadence.
Webhook-driven context	You want to react to events from Calendly, Cal.com, Granola, Zapier — "a meeting was just booked, prep me."
Designing projects for ingestion	You want snapshots routed cleanly into the right project without colliding.
Drive Deck with Claude	You want a Claude Code skill or short script to do all of the above without leaving your terminal.

The mental model

Your assistant address is the only interface. Deck doesn't care whether the message came from your phone, a cron job, a Lambda, or a Zapier zap — it reads the subject and body, decides what to do, and replies to you.

That means the only things you ever have to think about are:

• Subject prefix (optional) — Deck reads the whole message to decide where things land, so a prefix isn't required. That said, a convention like "Brain — …", "Pipeline — …", or "Deal: Acme …" makes intent unambiguous, helps you sort your own send-folder later, and keeps long-running snapshot jobs tidy.
• Body — either content to store (with "please store this in my X project"), or a question to answer.

The setup is one-time. Once a snapshot job is running, you stop thinking about it — the data just shows up in Deck the next time you ask a question. This is also how you keep Deck's context fresh without doing manual housekeeping.

Common questions

Do I need to be a developer?

No — every pattern here has a no-code path (Pipedream, Zapier, Make.com, Cron-job.org). The code recipes are for people who already script for fun or want to keep secrets on their own machine.

Will Deck reply to the cron job or webhook?

Replies always go to you — the human who owns the assistant address. If a script sends in your name, you see the reply.

What about API keys and OAuth tokens?

Stored on whatever runs your script — your laptop, GitHub Actions secrets, a managed runtime. Deck never sees them; it only reads the email that arrives.