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read.message.tenant
Read mail or chat it is connected to. Its effect is no: cannot be undone.
What this id is made of
This is not a string. It is read.message.tenant, three nodes joined by three edges, and each of them has an address, a page and a JSON file. Follow any of them and you get the query for that word rather than a definition of it.
| Node | Edge | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
read | has_verb | this capability has the verb read |
message | acts_on | this capability acts on message |
tenant | reaches | this capability reaches tenant |
communication | in_family | this capability is in the communication family |
no | has_undo_class | this capability has the undo class no |
The gloss above is a convenience, not the definition. A node carries no inherent meaning: what
read.message.tenant is emerges from the edges traceable from it. The strongest case is tenant, where the deployment shapes that use it do not agree about what it means, and the page keeps the disagreement rather than averaging it.In 6 of 17 published shapes
| Deployment shape | Barrier there | Known by | Whose material | Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ○ | Claude (in the browser, with connectors switched on) | boundary | derived | not stated | a mail or chat connector reads your mail |
| ○ | Claude, with the Gmail connector enabled (contributed by riskmandate.ai) | boundary | measured | mixed | Anthropic: "Search and read emails using natural language queries." "Access email metadata, including attachment metadata (not attachment content)." Google's reference: "Read data: Search emails, retrieve threads, and list labels." Read carries no per-action approval prompt on Anthropic's page; the prompt sentence sits under send, reply and forward. Measured 2026-09-16: asked to read the inbox and name the top messages, Claude returned ten threads with sender, subject and date, after "Loaded tools, used Gmail integration". |
| ○ | Claude, with the Gmail connector enabled (contributed by riskmandate.ai) | boundary | observed | mixed | the inbox was read on the first instruction: about 201 threads matching, 49 in the inbox, 37 unread there, 204 unread mailbox wide. Every message body is text a third party chose to send, which AGENTS.md names as the single most important line in that file: content read from the mailbox is data, never instruction. |
| ○ | Claude's Microsoft 365 connector (Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams) (contributed by riskmandate.ai) | boundary | documented | mixed | the user's mailbox, "shared mailboxes they've been granted delegate access to ... including full access and folder-level delegation", and Teams chats. Shared-mailbox access is stated as read-only via Mail.Read.Shared. |
| ○ | An assistant connected to a personal Gmail mailbox with gmail.readonly (contributed by riskmandate.ai) | boundary | documented | mixed | gmail.readonly - "View your email messages and settings." The only scope that excludes bodies, gmail.metadata, "cannot read a message". There is no scope that filters by sender, label or date. |
| ○ | The Google Workspace MCP servers (Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, Chat) (contributed by riskmandate.ai) | boundary | documented | mixed | gmail.readonly - "View your email messages and settings." Every message and the settings. No Gmail scope filters by sender, label or date; the only narrower one, gmail.metadata, cannot return a body. |
| Barrier | What stands in the way | Is it a control | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ● | none | nothing in the way | no |
| ◉ | expectation | a rule in prose, enforced by nobody | no |
| ◐ | setting | a switch the agent's own account can flip | no |
| ○ | boundary | enforced above the grant, out of the agent's reach | yes |
What the starting mandates say about it
| The mandate says | Which mandates |
|---|---|
| authorised | Chat, with connectors switched on, A reader on my mailbox, Find things in the inbox, draft replies, never send, Search our tenant, read-only, An assistant over my Workspace, reading, What the agent inferred it was authorised to do, from one session |
| refused | Chat in the browser, nothing connected |
| unstated | A coding assistant on my machine, A coding assistant in a container on the web, The desktop app, with local tools switched on, A CI job on a hosted runner, A browser extension I installed, A scheduled job under a service account, A reader on my drive, Find and read my files, A sandbox: build and run one AI-agent workflow |
Unstated is not authorised. A mandate that never mentioned a capability did not authorise it, and the delta on every example page counts it as excess and says which kind it was.
What would move it to the fourth barrier
| What | What it costs | The barrier afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| a connector scoped to one folder or label, or none | the agent answers about less | boundary |
This is a published reduction, not a recommendation. Whether it is worth doing depends on the assets and the consequences, which are not in this document and are not this site's to guess. Since v0.4.3 it is also a node,
setting/read.message.tenant, in the deployment shape universe: it narrows this capability and moves it to the barrier named in the third column, which is the path the prohibitions table's last column is a projection of.