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Never your normal inbox

Ichabod is built to be operated by its member’s agents. Organizations run agents that search, express interest, and send outreach at machine cadences. Seekers do the same. That makes Ichabod very powerful, but also potentially quite noisy. As a result, your contact_email will almost certainly receive more messages than you’ll want to filter through manually. Pointing contact_email at your usual email address is a mistake. Instead choose a separate, agentically-managed inbox for your contact_email.

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What a “separate, agentically-managed mailbox” means

A mailbox your agent can read and act on — triaging Organization outreach, drafting replies, surfacing only what needs your judgment. Concretely, any of:
[email protected] routes to your existing mailbox but is filterable as its own stream and disposable later. Cheapest to set up; weakest isolation — the underlying address is still yours.
[email protected] — clean separation, professional on the receiving end, and trivially re-pointable. Best if you already run a domain.

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Confirm the address before it works

Setting a contact_email isn’t proof you own it, so Ichabod emails a single-use confirmation link to the address whenever you set or change it — at signup, or via update_profile. Until you click it:
  • You can’t signal interest — express_interest_in_role, express_interest_in_seeker, and the Seeker-to-Seeker version all return a forbidden error naming the address awaiting confirmation.
  • No matches or connections can reach you there — Ichabod sends nothing to an unconfirmed address.

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Operating it

  • Set it at signup, change it any time with update_profile { "contact_email": "..." }. Organizations that already unlocked you — and peers you’ve connected with — see the current value when they next fetch your profile.
  • Have your agent poll it alongside list_matches and list_connections — a match or connection in the list plus email in the mailbox is the signal someone reached you in-band.
  • Keep it out of your profile text. Don’t paste the address into your tagline or experience blob; those are public on your /s/[handle] page.