# Text and email your bot

What to send a bot by iMessage, SMS or email, how follow-ups and fresh starts work, how the bot remembers you, and how to read the conversation in Machine Desktop.

Canonical page: https://themachine.myapps.ai/docs/desktop/inkbox/text-and-email

Once [Inkbox is set up](/docs/desktop/inkbox/set-up), text or email the bot
like you'd text a colleague. Anything you could ask in Machine works.

## Things to try

- *"Is the bakery site still up?"*
- *"Summarize what you did yesterday."*
- *"Draft a reply to Dana's question about the delivery date and send it to
  me first."*
- *"Find three florists near Elm Street that deliver before 7am."*
- Forward an email with *"Can you deal with this?"*

## What happens when you send one

1. Inkbox passes your message to Machine, which checks you're on the bot's
   allow-list.
2. The bot starts working on its computer, just as if you'd typed in the app.
3. For anything that takes a while, it sends a quick *"On it"* first.
4. It replies with the result, by the same route you used: an iMessage gets
   an iMessage, an email gets a reply in the same email thread.

## Follow-ups keep their context

Every text conversation and every email thread is its own **thread** in the
bot. Replies in the same text conversation, or the same email thread, carry on
where you left off: *"Great, now book the second one."*

### Start fresh

- **Text:** send **`/new`** to start a new thread. Put your request right
  after it to save a step: `/new check if the site is up`. The old thread stays
  in the bot.
- **Email:** start a new email with a new subject.

## The bot remembers you

The bot keeps notes in Inkbox about each person it talks to: who they are,
what they asked, what it did, and what's still open. So if you text today and
call tomorrow, it picks up where you left off. You can read and edit these
notes in the Inkbox Console.

The bot never writes passwords or secrets into its notes.

## Attachments

- **iMessage and SMS:** photos and files you send reach the bot as links.
  SMS links expire after about an hour, so the bot saves what it needs
  straight away.
- **Email:** the bot sees that an email has attachments and can open them.
- For big files, send a link instead.

## Read along in Machine Desktop

Each Inkbox conversation is a thread in the bot, so you can open it in Machine
Desktop (or the phone app) to see everything the bot did, step by step, and
download files it made. You can even carry on in the app.

## Ask the bot to reach you

From any thread in Machine, you can ask the bot to contact you or others:

- *"Text me when the deploy finishes."*
- *"Email the report to dana@northwind.co."*

The bot can email anyone. By SMS it can text people who have opted in (in the
US, texted **START** to its number). On the shared iMessage line it can only
text people who have connected to it first.

## Limits

- About **100 iMessages per bot per day**.
- By SMS, a number can text up to **100 different people a day** on Inkbox's
  default plan.
- Email and call minutes follow your Inkbox plan.
- Group text chats don't reach the bot yet; only one-to-one texts do.
- Texts like **STOP**, **START** and **HELP** are handled by Inkbox, not the
  bot.

More detail is in the [Inkbox reference](/docs/connect/inkbox#limits).