Other uses / Inbox, replies and forwarding

Inbox, replies and forwarding

Captures your contacts send you land in your inbox. You can answer them with a short reply, or forward one to your own coding session or hosted agent.

Sending to a contact

You can send to a contact once they follow you (see Contacts and following).

• Phone: capture as usual, then pick the contact under Or send to a contact. The app confirms with "Sent to alice".
• Machine: lwis send-to takes a contact (petname or id) and an image:

lwis send-to alice screenshot.png --note "is this the right cable?" --wait-ack 60 --wait-reply 300

The capture is sealed on your device for each of the contact's receiving devices. The server only stores ciphertext and deletes it once every recipient has fetched it, or after 24 hours at the latest.

Your inbox

• Phone: People → Inbox shows each capture with who sent it (your name for them), the picture, and their note. What you sent lists your own sends with their delivery status and replies.
• Linked browser: a browser linked to your phone has its own Inbox tab. It receives captures from your contacts and from your phone while the page is open, or when a notification wakes it (see Doorbells and notifications).
• Machine:

lwis inbox           # received captures (with their files), then what you sent
lwis inbox --json

lwis inbox prints each received capture's id (c_…), sender, age and note, followed by the paths of its decrypted files. For what you sent, it shows how many devices acknowledged it and how many replies came back. lwis keeps these records for 8 days.

A contact's capture never goes to your coding sessions or agents by itself. It stays in the inbox until you forward it.

Replying

A reply is a short text (up to 1,200 bytes; longer text is cut) that goes back to the sender only.

• Phone: tap Reply under the capture, type, then Send.
• Machine:

lwis reply c_3fa… "yes, the left one"

Replies are bound to one capture. A contact accepts your reply only while you are both still contacts and within 7 days of the capture they sent. Replies to your own sends show under Replies to what you sent on the phone, and in lwis inbox on a machine.

Forwarding to your agents

You can hand a contact's capture to one of your attached Claude Code sessions or to a hosted agent:

lwis forward c_3fa… --to receipts --note "file this under travel"
lwis forward c_3fa… --to <session id> --note "what is this error?" --reply-to-sender
lwis forwards        # what you forwarded, and the replies

--to takes a session id (lwis sessions) or a hosted agent's name (lwis agents list). A session must be attached first (/lwis:on inside it). Forwarding is refused while lwis is paused.

A forwarded capture is always handled in strict mode, whatever the target's settings:

• The sender is named by your petname and fingerprint, marked as not you. Their note, intent and page text are passed as untrusted data, never as instructions.
• Your --note is the only request the agent acts on.
• Actions with side effects wait for your approval.
• A hosted agent takes forwarded captures only if its profile's accept_from includes "self".

The agent's replies come to you: to your paired devices and to lwis forwards. With --reply-to-sender they also go to the original sender, but only while that sender would accept a reply from you (same 7-day rule as above). See Agent safety for how untrusted content is fenced.

Letting a contact reach an agent directly

Each contact has an agents setting, off by default. Turning it on lets their captures reach the hosted agents whose accept_from names them, without a forward:

lwis contacts policy alice               # show it
lwis contacts policy alice --agents on

Those captures are strict too. Today, neither the app nor lwis send-to can address someone else's agent, so in practice forwarding is how a contact's capture reaches your agents. See Hosted agents for accept_from.