Where your data lives
Your brains, pages and files are stored on managed cloud infrastructure. Content is encrypted at rest, and the databases behind Cortex are not exposed to the public internet: they sit on a private network that only the application can reach. In short, your knowledge is held securely, not sitting in the open.Mail is never kept
Email is the one thing Cortex deliberately does not store. When you forward a thread to your brain, or a collector posts one in, the message is readable only while the item waits to be filed. Filing destroys it: on archive, on reject, on delete, and on the seventh day if nothing has filed it by then. What is left is the record of the delivery, the subject, the link back to your mailbox, the date and the pages it was filed to, and the lines the filing wrote. There is nothing to download afterwards and nothing to read back. Attachments never arrive in the first place; only their names do. Forwarded mail passes through one more hand: the mail routing service that receives a message sent to your brain’s address and hands it to Cortex. It handles the message in transit and stores nothing. A delivery that is refused, because it did not come from an address you verified, or because the sending domain failed its sender checks, is counted on the brain with the date and the sender’s domain. The message behind it is not stored, and nothing is sent back to whoever sent it. Mail can only enter the brain whose address it was sent to, and only from an address a member has proved to that brain with a code. Nothing in the message, no setting and no instruction to an agent can send it anywhere else.The member list is the boundary
Access to a brain is its member list, full stop:- Only members can open a brain, search it, or reach it through an agent. A brain you have not been added to is invisible to you; you cannot even confirm it exists.
- Your work brain starts with one member: you. Nothing anyone else does adds them to it; you would have to add them yourself. Anything that lands there, an agent conversation, a quick upload, an incoming meeting, is visible only to you unless you deliberately promote it elsewhere.
- Roles cap what members can do. Readers read; Writers write; Admins and Owners manage. Your agents act as you and are held to the same roles, checked live on every request.