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How Team Notes Are Matched Across Inboxes (Fuzzy Matching)
When a teammate writes a team note on an email, that note has to "find" the exact same email in your inbox so you can read it. This page explains how that matching works, why it is intentionally a fuzzy match (not an exact ID match), and the one edge case to know about.
You do not need to do anything for matching to work — it is completely automatic. This page is for users who want to understand what's happening behind the scenes.
The short version
Two teammates can each receive a copy of the same email in their own inboxes. To make a single team note appear on both copies, we match them by:
  1. Subject line
  2. Send time (Gmail's internal date)
  3. Sender
When all three line up across teammates, those copies are treated as "the same real-world email," and your team note attaches to all of them. For almost every real-person email, this works perfectly.
Why fuzzy, and not just "the email's ID"?
Each email does have a unique global identifier. The obvious question is: why don't we just match on that?
The honest answer: our backend isn't allowed to read your Gmail directly. That is by design — your inbox content stays on your devices, not on our servers (see Privacy & Under the Hood in the main FAQ). The unique Message-ID lives inside the email's full headers, which our servers never fetch or see.
What our servers do see are the visible metadata fields: subject, sender, date, and snippet. We use those to match. It is a necessary technical trade-off made strictly in favor of your data privacy.
When fuzzy matching gets it wrong
There is one situation where this logic struggles: automated emails with the exact same subject, sent at almost the same time, from the same sender.
The canonical example is a website contact-form notification:
Every submission generates an email titled "New form submission", from the same sender, sometimes seconds apart. To our matcher, they look identical.
In that case, a note your teammate wrote on submission #1 can occasionally appear to attach to submission #2 when #2 arrives. Nothing is actually lost, but it can land on the wrong email in the list.
Other species of the same problem include Stripe receipts (same subject for every transaction) or calendar reminders.
What to do when it happens
  • For the affected email: Write a fresh note where you actually want it. The matcher only confuses identical-subject series; a new note attaches cleanly.
  • For the misattached note: Edit or delete it from where it landed. The change will sync everywhere.
What we're doing about it
This is a known technical challenge. The fix on our roadmap is to identify each real-world email more precisely at ingest time using the message snippet (the short preview of the body) as an additional fingerprint. Since automated emails with identical subjects usually differ on snippet content, this future update will largely eliminate the wrong-note issue.
Quick answers
Does this affect personal notes? No. Personal notes attach to a specific email in your personal inbox — there is no cross-inbox matching needed.
Does this affect SGN's own notes for me? No. SGN matches by Gmail's thread ID inside your own inbox, which is exact. Fuzzy matching only kicks in across teammates' inboxes.
Why don't you just store the Message-ID? Because our backend never reads your full Gmail inbox. Storing the Message-ID would require server-side inbox access, which we deliberately do not do for privacy reasons.