Read-Only Is Structural, Not a Discipline: Ten Traps in Wiring a Self-Hosted Mailbox to AI
Wiring a self-hosted mailbox into an AI assistant: the protocol half is easy, making read-only structural rather than a promise is not. Traps hit along the way — a rejection letter whose boilerplate says has been accepted, a syntax check that passed while authentication became dead code, a shared failure latch that took every user down at once, and why a synthetic click cannot tell a dead button from a blocked popup.
