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 an office copy and your answer goes to the family, and she steps out of that conversation.

You decide how much Elira sends by email. The setting is What Elira may send in the Answering family email card on AI Knowledge, and it changes email only — your text line and website chat are not affected.

Pilot review and the three settings

Charter pilots require review. Elira prepares drafts for your office to read and send. A saved automatic preference does not override this pilot rule. Paid schools retain their chosen reply mode.

If your school has an authorized Gmail pilot, its choices are Off or office approval. Off stays Off. With office approval, read the draft and press Send in Gmail. Staff-reply facts wait for separate approval before Elira reuses them; do not approve household details or sensitive information as general knowledge. Gmail availability and school authorization still need verification.

I read every reply (default). This is what every 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 to <your school>. 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 the safe ones. 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.

Send them all. 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.

Replying to that copy (Reply or Reply All) answers the family. What you write at the top is emailed to them from your school's address, as a reply in their own conversation. The copy quoted underneath your reply is not sent — so write only what you want the family to read.

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. Your office then gets a copy showing exactly what the family received.

Your reply is not sent to the family when it is an automatic out-of-office reply, when nothing was written above the quoted copy, when we cannot separate what you wrote from the copy you replied to, or when the family has unsubscribed from your school's email. The conversation is still yours in every one of those cases, and the copy your office gets says which one happened — email the family directly at the address it shows.

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: it is not sent to the family, and she is not held off the family's next email — your office gets a copy saying exactly that. To hold her off, reply to an earlier copy from that family with its subject left as it is.

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

Elira answers each email on its own. She does not read the earlier messages in the conversation, so a follow-up like *"and what about my younger son?"* goes to your office. There is no setting for this on the dashboard.

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.