Read access controls how much of your team’s email CTD can see when building your company’s relationship graph. There are two levels:

Metadata-only

CTD sees the surface-level details of emails, not the content inside them: who sent and received each message (from, to, cc, bcc) and the subject line. Message bodies are never accessed.

That is enough to build your scored relationship graph: if two people exchange a lot of email in both directions, CTD marks that relationship as strong.

About subject lines: subject lines are stored encrypted in our database. No one, including the CTD team, can view them in plain text. On your explicit request, we can also skip storing subject lines entirely.

Read-only

Read-only includes everything in metadata-only, plus access to the email body, but only when a user explicitly requests it. When someone opens a message in CTD, we call the Google or Microsoft API in real time to display the content to them.

Email bodies are never stored on our servers: the content is fetched only at the moment it is viewed, and only for the person viewing it. Read-only also lets CTD parse contact details from email signatures, such as phone numbers and titles.

Those parsed details are then surfaced back to each user in the app, via the API, and via MCP. For example, if one of a user’s contacts has their phone number in their email signature, that number becomes available to that user on the contact’s profile and through the API and MCP. This information is never shared with anyone else: each user only sees the contact details of people they have directly communicated with, extracted from their own inbox.

Which should you choose?

As the admin, you are choosing the read access level for your entire organization. Choose based on your company’s privacy preferences: metadata-only is the most conservative option, while read-only gives your team richer context, with full message view on demand and signature-based contact details. Most organizations go with the level agreed with their Account Executive during setup, and you can change the level or revoke access for the whole workspace at any time.

Learn more

For how read access is granted, see domain-wide delegation & email scopes, and for the full picture of our data practices, what data CTD collects.