Family Inbox

The Family Inbox gives your household its own email address. Forward school notices, party invitations, receipts, and photos to it, and they land in a shared inbox that every member can read. It's included with every plan.

Members can read the inbox; admins set it up and act on what arrives. Guests don't see it.

1. On the web, open Settings → Family Inbox.
2. Tap Create an inbound address. You'll get a random address ending in @in.chickadeebandit.com. Tap Copy.
3. Save it as a contact on your phone, so forwarding is two taps from anywhere.
4. Forward from the email address you sign in to Chickadee Bandit with. Mail from any member's sign-in address goes straight into the inbox; from any other address, it waits in Quarantine until an admin allows it (see below).

Rotate swaps the address for a new one. The old address stops working at once, so any forwarding rules pointing at it need updating. Only use it if the address has leaked.

To keep out spam and fakes, mail goes straight into the inbox only when it comes from a household member's address, or from a sender you've allowed, and passes the email system's own check that the sender is genuine. Everything else waits in Quarantine, where only admins can see it, for 14 days.

For each held message an admin can choose Release to inbox, Release + always allow (so that sender skips Quarantine from then on), Block sender, or Delete. Mail from a blocked sender is refused and never stored.

This matters if you set up an automatic forward from the school's address or your email provider: those messages keep their original sender, so they'll wait in Quarantine until you allow that sender once. If your email provider sends a confirmation message before it will forward, look for it in Quarantine too.

Add a tag to the address, before the @, to file attachments as they arrive:

• +photos puts images into Family Photos;
• +docs puts files into the Document Library;
• +receipts puts receipts into Finances.

So if your address were finch-1a2b3c@in.chickadeebandit.com, you'd send receipts to finch-1a2b3c+receipts@in.chickadeebandit.com. The app has to be installed for a tag to work. You can also file a message's attachments later with its Send attachments to buttons.

A calendar invitation attached to an email shows up with an Add to calendar button. For everything else, AI event detection can read the email text and suggest calendar events, tasks, or grocery items, each with a button to add it. Nothing is ever added without someone tapping, and attachments are never sent to AI.

Detection is on by default and runs on Cloudflare, where the rest of Chickadee Bandit runs; the email text isn't sent to any other company unless an admin chooses otherwise, as described next. An admin can turn detection off under the inbox's settings. There's a daily limit on how many emails are read this way.

An admin can also turn on Use higher-quality parsing, which sends the email text (not the attachments) to Anthropic for better results. Each email or photo read this way uses one of the household's AI credits. Photos spend a credit unless an admin turns that off, and at most five a day; incoming email spends credits only if an admin turns that on, and at most three a day. Past a daily limit, or with no credits left, detection runs on Cloudflare as usual. A shared space has no credits of its own: it uses those of the household that sponsors it, and shares that household's daily limits, unless the sponsor turns that off under Billing.

A message can be up to 25 MB, with up to 20 attachments. Photos (JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF), PDFs, Word and Excel files, plain text, and calendar invitations are kept. Any attachment that can't be kept is listed on the message with the reason, and the rest of the message still arrives.

Choose how long messages are kept under Keep inbox messages for: 90 days, 1 year (the default), 3 years, or forever. Deleting a message deletes its attachments too. Your household's data export includes the inbox and its attachments.

Forwarded email can also trigger an automation.