Decide how much Elira sends by email, and take a conversation over
Choose whether Elira emails families by herself, drafts every reply for you first, or only sends the safe ones. Reply to a family yourself and she steps out of that conversation.
You decide how much Elira sends by email. The setting is on AI Knowledge, and it changes email only — your text line and website chat are not affected.
The three settings
Send the safe answers, draft the rest. Elira sends an answer by herself only when two things are true: the answer came from your own verified information, and it does not rest on a date or a time. Everything else waits for you. A wrong date reaches every family who asks, so those are the ones held back.
Draft every reply. This is what a school starts on. No answer reaches a family until a person presses Send. Email is deliberately not like your text line: a text is answered in seconds because that is what a text is, but an email to your office is a letter to your mailbox, and your mailbox stays the record of what your school said. Every one waits under Replies waiting for you, where you read it and press Send or Discard.
The one thing Elira sends by herself on this setting is a short receipt: *"Thanks for writing — I've passed your question to the office team and they'll email you back soon."* It carries no answer and no school information. It is there because the alternative is a parent who writes in and hears nothing at all until somebody opens this page — which is the problem this whole channel was built to end. The same receipt goes out whenever a question is handed to your office.
Send every answer. Elira sends any answer she is allowed to produce. She still refuses anything sensitive, and anything she cannot ground in your information still goes to your office.
A copy in your own mailbox
Your office address gets a copy of every family conversation: what they asked, and what Elira said. Elira's mailbox is not one your staff signs in to, so without this you would never see the conversation itself.
The copy is addressed so that Reply All reaches the family through Elira. That is deliberate, and it is how the next part works.
Taking a conversation over
Reply to one of those copies yourself and the conversation becomes yours. Elira stops answering that family — completely, not just once — so the two of you never reply over each other in front of a parent.
Leave the subject line alone. Each copy's subject ends with a short reference in brackets — *(ref a1b2c3d4e5f6)* — and that reference is how your reply is matched to the right family. Your mail program keeps it automatically when you press Reply or Reply All. If someone retypes the subject, Elira does not answer that one message, but the reply cannot be attached to the conversation and she is not held off the family's next email — your office gets a copy saying exactly that, with a link to take the conversation over properly.
She does not take it back on her own after a few days. You hand it back when you are ready, from Conversations on AI Knowledge. Until then every new email from that family waits for a person, and a copy still reaches your office, so nothing is lost.
Remembering the rest of the conversation
Off unless you switch it on. When it is on, Elira reads the earlier messages in an email conversation, so *"and what about my younger son?"* makes sense to her instead of going to your office.
Two limits, both deliberate:
- She reads only the family's own messages and her own earlier replies. Anything a staff member wrote is never included, because a staff reply usually names a specific child and that must not reach the AI.
- Earlier messages are not part of a family's enrollment record, so switching this on changes what leaves your building. Read section 3.5 of your data agreement first.
Good to know
- Two staff pressing Send on the same draft sends one email, not two.
- A draft you discard is never sent, and the family is told nothing.
- If you pause Elira entirely, none of this runs and every question goes to your office.