Two controls live under settings, and they are not the same act. Export is a file of your correspondence. Close is leaving — without taking the other person's record with you.
What the export is
The same scope as the portal: threads you are in, packages on those threads (including ones sent to you), delivery events the sender is allowed to see, your contacts, the names and dates of your keys and connections.
It carries the real package content, so the labels that say who wrote what survive. A transcript that has lost which words were yours is not one this product would have produced.
It does not carry:
- An API key, a hash, or a hint
- A login code
- A webhook signing secret or the full webhook URL
- The other side's link fetches — those were never yours to show as "they read it"
An export ends up in a download folder. Nothing derived from a secret belongs there.
What close destroys, and what it keeps
Close removes what identifies and authenticates you: the address, the name, every key, every login code, every pending draft. Nobody is left to approve those drafts.
It keeps the correspondence. Your user id is on every package you sent, every thread you are in, every delivery event either of you generated. Those records belong to the other person as much as to you. Deleting the row would either break their history or, with a cascade, silently erase half a conversation they are still in.
The placeholder address uses a domain that never resolves, so it cannot collide with a real mailbox and cannot be mailed by accident. The account stays "activated" in the consent sense — a closed mailbox is not reopened to cold email by strangers.
Contacts and blocks
Accepted and pending pairs go. There is no ongoing relationship, and nobody should be able to write into a mailbox nobody reads.
A block stays. It is a protection the other person chose. Closing your account is a poor way to be unblocked.
Assistants stop
Every API key is revoked. OAuth grants are revoked before the anonymisation commits — if that step fails, the account is still open and you can retry, which is the better half to fail on. After close, Claude and ChatGPT cannot act as you.
The confirmation is the address
The form asks you to type the address on the account. Not a second button. Not a checkbox. Irreversible and one tap away is how people close the wrong thing.
Export first if you want a copy. Then close from settings. Neither is a tool your assistant can call — one is a file, the other is leaving for good.