Email Client

Writing fiction is only half the job. The other half — the part nobody talks about in MFA programs — is correspondence. Query letters to agents. Follow-ups when you haven’t heard back in six weeks. Pitches to editors. Thank-you notes after a review. Cold outreach to indie reviewers. Reader emails that deserve a real reply. All of it runs through email, and all of it competes with the thing you actually want to be doing, which is writing the next chapter.

The reason Ishvana has an email client built in isn’t that Gmail is broken. Gmail works fine. The reason is the same reason Ishvana has a browser built in — every time you leave your writing environment to handle correspondence, you pay a context-switching tax, and the tax compounds. Open Gmail, answer three emails, remember you need to check something in your project, switch back, try to remember where you were. An hour later you’ve answered six emails and written nothing. An email client that lives inside your author workbench means the correspondence stays adjacent to the work instead of competing with it.

And because Hawken has access to your project, the drafting actually knows what book you’re pitching and who you’re pitching it to. That’s the thing you can’t get from Gmail.

Inbox

Split-pane message view, keyboard-navigable, designed to feel closer to a desktop mail client than a webmail UI.

• Message list on the left — sender, subject, date, read/unread indicators, star flags.
• Message viewer on the right — full message content for the selected row.
• Folder navigation — Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, Spam, plus whatever custom folders your provider exposes.
• Unread count badge on the Inbox folder so you know at a glance what’s new.
• Message actions — star, unstar, move to trash, report spam, mark read, mark unread.
• Paginated loading — fifty messages per page with a “load more” button. Keeps the UI fast even on accounts with years of history.
• Search — filter the active folder by sender, subject, or body content.

Compose

The compose window handles new messages, replies, and forwards from the same editor:

• To, CC, BCC recipient fields.
• Subject and body with both plain text and HTML editing.
• Reply-to and references headers for proper threading.
• Send now, or save as draft and finish later.
• Template picker for pre-filling subject and body from a saved template.
• Generate Draft and Generate Reply buttons for Hawken-assisted writing.

Replies open with the original message context already attached, so the drafting has everything it needs to answer in the right tone and reference the right details.

Templates

Reusable email templates for the correspondence you write over and over. Six built-in categories:

Category	Use case
Query	Cold query letters to agents and editors
Follow-up	Polite nudges when you haven’t heard back
Pitch	Direct pitches for a specific book or opportunity
Thank-you	Thank-you notes after reviews, interviews, or coverage
Cold-outreach	First-contact emails to reviewers, podcasters, or influencers
Custom	Anything that doesn’t fit the above

Each template has a name, a subject template, a body template, and variable placeholders you can fill in when you apply it. Build a clean query letter template once, and every future query is a two-minute adaptation instead of a twenty-minute rewrite.

Hawken-assisted drafting Agent

This is the part that makes an in-app email client worth using instead of Gmail.

Generate Draft

Creates a new email from a structured prompt:

• Purpose — query, follow-up, pitch, thank-you, cold-outreach, reply, or custom.
• Recipient — name and context (who they are, why you’re writing to them).
• Tone — professional, warm, formal, casual.
• Key points — the list of topics you want the email to cover.
• Marketing Brief — optionally pull in your book’s marketing brief so Hawken can reference the actual pitch, comparable titles, audience, and hook without you re-typing them.

Hawken writes the draft in your voice, streams it into the compose window, and you edit from there. The streaming is the part that matters — you see the draft emerge live and can hit stop the moment it goes wrong, instead of waiting for a full generation and then discarding it.

Generate Reply

Same parameters, plus the original message text for context. Hawken reads the message you’re replying to and generates a response that actually answers what they said, in the tone and style you specified. Abort button is always available mid-stream.

The Marketing Brief is the secret

Hawken’s drafts get dramatically better the moment your project has a Marketing Brief filled out. The brief gives the agent your pitch, your audience, your comparable titles, and your hook — all the context that makes a query letter sound like it was written by an author who knows their book, instead of by a chatbot that’s guessing.

Account management

App passwords are mandatory for most providers

Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo all require app passwords instead of your regular account password. You generate one in your account’s security settings and paste it into Ishvana. Your regular password won’t work — this is the provider’s choice, not ours, and there’s no workaround.

Provider presets

Gmail

Pre-filled IMAP and SMTP settings for Gmail. Requires an app password — generate one under Google Account → Security → 2-Step Verification → App passwords.

Outlook

Pre-filled settings for Outlook and Hotmail. Requires an app password from your Microsoft account security settings.

Zoho

Pre-filled settings for Zoho Mail. App password may or may not be required depending on your account type.

Other

Custom IMAP and SMTP configuration for any email provider. Enter host, port, username, password, SSL settings, and auth type manually.

The full list of provider presets includes Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Zoho, Namecheap, IONOS, and Purelymail. If your provider isn’t on the list, use the Custom option and enter IMAP and SMTP details by hand — any standards-compliant email host works.

Per-account configuration:

• Label and display name.
• Email address.
• IMAP host, port, SSL, username, password.
• SMTP host, port, SSL, username, password.
• Signature block appended to every outgoing message.
• Sync interval — how often the client checks for new mail.
• Default account flag when you have more than one.

Test Connection button verifies IMAP and SMTP independently before saving. Nothing is worse than setting up an email account, trying to send a message, and discovering three days later that the SMTP settings were wrong the whole time. Test it before you save it.

Multi-account support lets you wire up multiple accounts at once — a personal address for reader mail, a dedicated author address for queries, maybe a throwaway address for cold outreach — and switch between them from the compose window via the account selector dropdown.

Sync, spam, and query letter integration

• Manual sync — a sync button in the sidebar fetches new messages on demand and shows a count of how many came in. Auto-sync runs at your configured interval in the background.
• Spam handling — report messages as spam to move them to the Spam folder, or report as not-spam to pull them back into the Inbox. Useful for training providers that learn from your feedback.
• Query letter integration — send query letters directly from the Marketing module’s submission tracker. The email is sent through your default account, and the sent record is linked back to the submission in the tracker so you always know which submissions actually went out and which are still in draft.

The query letter integration is the part most authors appreciate after using it for a couple of months. Submission tracking is usually a spreadsheet or a mental list; having the actual email linked to the submission record means you can always go back and see exactly what you sent and when.

A typical email session

1. Open the Email tab. The sidebar shows folders, compose, sync, templates, and search.
2. Sync (or wait for auto-sync). New messages appear in Inbox with unread badges.
3. Click a message to read it. Reply, forward, archive, or move on.
4. To write something new, click Compose. Pick a template, or click Generate Draft and describe what you want Hawken to write.
5. Edit the generated draft until it sounds right. Send, or save as draft for later.
6. For queries, use the Marketing module’s submission tracker — it sends through the Email module and links the sent message back to the submission record automatically.

What’s next

Marketing Query letter generation, submission tracking, and the Marketing Brief that powers Hawken's email drafts.

Email Accounts Setup Detailed IMAP/SMTP configuration for every supported provider.

Settings Configure email accounts, sync intervals, and default signatures.