family inbox · v1

The Family Inbox

One shared email address for every email Mom’s providers send. Every sibling sees what arrives. Nobody is out of the loop because they weren’t the one holding Mom’s phone.

Open the app How it works

What it is

Every loved one in your care circle gets a private, dedicated email address. Hand it to providers, attorneys, pharmacies, insurance carriers, and adult-day programs the same way you’d hand them a personal email — except this inbox is shared with everyone in the family who’s on the care circle. Discharge summary lands at 4 p.m., all four siblings see it at 4 p.m.

Real problem it solves: the elder-care “phone tag” loop — Dad’s cardiologist emails reminders to whichever sibling drove him last, the pharmacy texts a number that nobody answers anymore, the Medicare EOB goes to a paper address Mom hasn’t opened in years. Family Inbox makes one place every relevant message can land where every authorized family member can find it.

How it works

  1. You create a care circle in app.joinsandwich.com and add a loved one.
  2. Sandwich provisions a unique email address for that loved one (something like helen-smith-AB12@lovedone.app). The address is stable and never reused if you delete it.
  3. You give that address to providers and put it on intake forms.
  4. Mail sent to that address shows up in the Family Inbox in the app, threaded by sender, with PDF attachments preserved and viewable.
  5. Every family member you’ve added to the care circle sees the same inbox in real time.

How to use it

Get the address

Sign in at app.joinsandwich.com, open a loved one’s page, and copy the email address shown at the top. It’s ready to share immediately.

Hand it out

  • At the provider’s intake desk — write it in the “email” field. Patient-portal sign-ups will email enrollment links to it, and follow-up appointment reminders will land there too.
  • To the pharmacy — refill notifications come straight to the inbox.
  • To insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid — EOBs, plan changes, and benefit notices.
  • On legal and estate documents — attorney correspondence, advance-directive confirmations.
  • To home-care agencies that don’t already integrate with Sandwich Pipe — daily visit summaries, scheduling messages.

Forward what’s already arriving elsewhere

For mail that already lands in a personal inbox of yours or a sibling’s, set up a forwarding rule so a copy goes to the Family Inbox. Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and Yahoo all support rule-based forwarding. After a week or two you stop having to forward manually — future mail from that sender starts going to the Family Inbox directly because the sender has the right address on file.

What typically lands in it

Hospital discharge
Summaries, follow-up instructions, prescriptions to fill, contact info for the discharge social worker.
Specialist appointments
Cardiology, neurology, geriatrics — appointment confirmations, pre-visit forms, post-visit notes that the practice emails.
Pharmacy
Refill reminders, autofill confirmations, prior-authorization status.
Medicare / Medicaid / insurance
EOBs, plan documents, IRMAA notices, benefit changes, denial letters.
Home-care & adult-day programs
Daily summaries, schedule changes, incident notices, billing.
Legal & estate
Power of attorney, advance directive, will updates, attorney follow-ups.
Senior-living & assisted-living facilities
Move-in coordination, billing, family-meeting invitations, community notices.

Privacy & access

  • Only people on the care circle see the inbox. Adding a sibling means they see everything from that point on. Removing them cuts off access immediately.
  • Mail is stored encrypted at rest in a HIPAA-eligible cloud, the same posture as the rest of Sandwich’s health-adjacent data.
  • No marketing scrape, no ad targeting. Sandwich does not read or analyze inbox contents for advertising or any third-party purpose.
  • The address is per-loved-one. Two parents in your circle each get their own inbox address; mail never crosses between them.
  • HIPAA — what to know: family members are the HIPAA-recognized personal representatives of their loved one in most state-law contexts. You’re forwarding mail you already have the right to see. See the HHS guidance on personal representatives.

What it can & can’t do

It can:

  • Receive any email addressed to the loved one’s Sandwich address.
  • Preserve attachments — PDFs, scanned letters, intake forms — for the whole family.
  • Thread by sender so a six-month-long thread with the cardiologist’s office reads as one conversation.
  • Keep history. Mail isn’t deleted when a sibling leaves the circle (only their access is revoked).

It can’t:

  • Reply by default in v1. The inbox is a receive-only surface today — if a sibling needs to reply, do it from their own email and BCC the Family Inbox to keep the thread. Send-from-inbox is on the roadmap.
  • Pull from another inbox automatically. If providers already email a personal address, set up forwarding rules on that account.
  • Log you into MyChart. Patient portals are a different lane — see Inbox vs. Pipe vs. portals.
  • Open paper mail. Physical USPS mail to a P.O. Box isn’t scanned in (yet). Some carriers send PDF EOBs via email if you ask — switching them over once is enough.

Inbox vs. Pipe vs. portals

Sandwich connects to provider data through three different lanes. Use the right one for the right source:

Family Inbox — email
Catches anything a provider can email. Works with everyone, even providers Sandwich has no formal integration with. No setup on the provider’s side. This page.
Sandwich Pipe — partner push
For partners who can send signed webhooks (home-care agencies on Sandwich Soft, modern care platforms, some EHRs). Events flow in real time and appear on the loved one’s timeline.
Patient-portal pull — FHIR (roadmap)
For data that only the family can pull from a portal — MyChart, Epic, Cerner / Oracle Health, athenahealth, Apple Health Records. Authorized once per loved one, then Sandwich keeps the records in sync. Not yet enabled.

FAQ

Can I use my own email address for a loved one?

No — the whole point is one shared address that all family members see. Forward mail from your personal inbox into the Family Inbox if you want to keep using your own address with a provider too.

Can the loved one read the inbox themselves?

If you add them as a family member with their own Sandwich account, yes. Whether to do that depends on the situation — many circles include the loved one early on, then rely on family-member oversight as needs change.

What happens to mail when a loved one passes away?

The inbox stays accessible to circle members so estate, insurance, and Medicare/Medicaid wind-down mail can be handled. Disable inbound mail when you’re done; history is preserved.

What if I get spam?

Sandwich filters obvious spam before it reaches the inbox. Any unwanted sender can be blocked per-address from the inbox UI.

Can agents read the inbox?

The MCP server doesn’t expose inbox tools in v1 — care events are surfaced by list_care_events, but inbox-specific reads are deferred. If you want an AI assistant to draft a reply to the cardiologist, copy the message into your assistant manually for now. See the MCP docs for what agents can do today.

Looking for the rest of the stack? MCP · Sandwich Pipe · Sandwich Soft · All docs