Memory

TabMail’s memory feature allows the agent to recall past conversations. Your chat is persistent — conversations carry across window opens and closes, so you always pick up where you left off. Chat history is also indexed locally using the same full-text search technology as email, enabling the agent to find and reference previous discussions.

How it works

Each exchange is automatically indexed into a local memory database as it happens. This allows the agent to:

  • Search past conversations — Find relevant discussions by keyword or topic
  • Recall context — Retrieve previous exchanges to understand earlier decisions
  • Build continuity — Reference earlier conversations when helping with related tasks

When you reopen the chat window, your previous messages are restored exactly as you left them. If you’ve been away for a while, TabMail greets you with a welcome-back message and any relevant reminders.

The agent uses the memory_search tool to find past conversations. This tool supports:

  • Full-text search — Find conversations containing specific words or phrases
  • Stemming — “meeting” matches “meetings”, “meet”, etc.
  • Synonyms — “urgent” also matches “asap”, “priority”, “critical”
  • Date filtering — Search within a specific time range
  • Pagination — Browse through many results efficiently

Even after older messages are trimmed from the active chat window to keep conversations efficient, they remain searchable in memory.

Example prompts:

  • “What did we discuss about the project timeline?”
  • “Find our conversation about the marketing budget from last month.”
  • “When did I ask you to draft that email to John?”

Memory read

When the agent finds a relevant conversation via search, it can use memory_read to retrieve the matching exchanges. This provides context including:

  • Messages from both you and the agent
  • The flow of the conversation around the matched topic
  • Any decisions or actions taken

Managing your memory

Chat history is managed in Prompts → Chat History:

  • Search — Find specific conversations by keyword
  • Delete old — Remove conversations older than a specified number of days
  • Clear all — Remove all chat history and reset the conversation

Storage

Memory is stored locally in your Thunderbird profile:

  • Database: memory.db (separate from email search)
  • Location: Same directory as the email FTS database
  • Format: SQLite with FTS5 for fast full-text search

Because memory is separate from email indexing, clearing or rebuilding your email search index does not affect your chat history.

Privacy

Your chat history and memory is stored locally in Thunderbird. When the agent searches or reads memory, content is sent for processing but is not retained. You can always disable AI features at any time with a single toggle in your settings. For more details, see Privacy Policy.

Last updated: March 30, 2026