Message Moe

Message Moe, under Reach in the main window, is the chat apps you can message Moe from, so a text from your phone gets an answer. It answers while this Mac is awake; asleep, your message waits, unless you have Away, where your cloud computer answers instead and it is the same conversation.

Seven rows: Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Slack, Discord, LINE and Email Moe. The page groups them as You can reach Moe here (connected), Pick how you want to reach Moe or Also possible, and, at the top in amber, Waiting to be let in when somebody has knocked.

Telegram#

One click. Create my Telegram bot opens Telegram's own Create bot screen for @MoeSetupBot, Moe's bot-making bot, with the name Moe already filled in; tap Create and the bot is yours, belonging to your Telegram account with an @moe_…_bot username of its own, and Moe picks it up from there. No BotFather, no token to copy anywhere. The link is good for about half an hour; if it goes stale Moe says so and gets you a fresh one. Then pair your phone: open the bot Telegram just showed you and send it any message; it appears on this page, you approve it, and you are done. The bot's @username is the one thing Moe does not choose beyond that pattern; Telegram lets you change it yourself, in BotFather, if you care to.

Connecting the bot does not let Moe read your existing chats; that is My own Telegram under Connections, a separate thing.

WhatsApp#

One QR code, shown in Moe: open WhatsApp › Settings › Linked Devices › Link a Device and scan it. If the code expires on screen Moe shows the next one. This is the same link as WhatsApp on this Mac under Connections: one linked device gives you both the number you can message Moe on and the copy of your chats it reads from. On your phone the linked device is called Moe. Read the warning first: linking a device is against WhatsApp's terms, accounts have been banned for it, and the link drops every few weeks and needs scanning again. Because it is a link to your phone, it stays on the Mac that scanned it and cannot move to your cloud computer.

Signal#

Signal has no bots, so Moe joins your own Signal account as a device, the same thing Signal Desktop is. You scan one code (Signal › Settings › Linked devices › +) and from then on you talk to Moe in Note to Self; its answers appear there. Before the code, a sheet says what linking means and waits for Continue: this Mac receives your whole Signal account, every chat and group, the way any linked device does. Moe acts only on what you write in Note to Self; it never answers your contacts, it is never in your groups, and a message from someone else gets silence rather than a reply from your account. The first time you connect it, Moe downloads the Signal software it needs, about 180 MB, once, and only if you connect Signal. Unlink whenever you like from Signal › Settings › Linked devices, or with Disconnect on the row, which deletes the keys from this Mac. Signal answers while this Mac is awake and stays on this Mac.

If anyone else logs in to this Mac, do not connect Signal. While Moe is running, the Signal software listens on a local connection that has no password, and on a Mac every login and every program can reach a local connection. Someone else signed in to the same Mac could read your Signal messages and send them as you. On a Mac that only you use, that is no wider than what the programs you run can already see.

Slack#

Add to Slack opens a page that first names the Moe account Slack is being added to, partly hidden, like s\\\\@gmail.com; if that isn't yours, choose This isn't my Moe account and nothing happens. Then you sign in with Google as that same account, so a link somebody else made cannot connect your Slack to their Moe unless they can sign in as you. Slack's own page follows: pick a workspace and choose Allow, and Moe is there under Apps. Finally Moe on your Mac asks once more, Slack workspace … as … wants to connect — confirm?, and nothing you write in Slack reaches Moe until you confirm. Moe reads only what is written to it: its own Messages tab, and "@Moe" in a channel someone has added it to. A connected row offers Add to Slack again for a second workspace. If a workspace deletes Moe or revokes its access, Moe removes itself from that workspace and the row says so and why; Add to Slack puts it back.

If your workspace does not allow apps from outside, the sheet still takes two keys from a Slack app of your own, a bot key and an app-level key.

What Moe keeps of a Slack conversation: what it learned, not what was said. Slack is the one chat app where Moe reads your messages, updates its memory, and does not keep the messages themselves. Once its reply has been sent, the words of that exchange are removed from the conversation history on your Mac and, if you have one, on your cloud computer; a short note saying no verbatim copy kept stands where they were. What Moe took from them stays: a fact it learned about you, a reminder it set, a task it carried out. So Moe cannot quote back what you wrote to it in Slack last week; ask it what it learned and it will tell you.

Discord and LINE#

Discord wants one key from its developer portal; LINE wants two from its developers console. Each row says which and links to the page, and the sheet leads with what the key is, why Moe needs it, the numbered steps, and what happens if you skip. LINE only ever delivers to a public web address, which a Mac at home does not have, so connecting LINE points it at Moe's cloud, which hands each message to your Mac while it is awake; that needs this Mac signed in to Moe, and the row says so until it is.

Email Moe#

You can have an email address of your own for Moe: yourname@in.moebot.app. Choose my address takes a name, and from then on you write to Moe at that address from your usual email and Moe answers in the same thread, from that address. The row shows the address with Copy address, and Change address… lets you pick another name, up to three times in thirty days; your old name isn't given to anyone else for thirty days, and Disconnect lets it go with the same wait.

Your mail is recognised as yours; everyone else has to be let in. Mail from the address you signed in to Moe with is yours, once Moe has checked it was really sent by that address, in the last two days, unchanged since it was signed, and written to your Moe address. Mail from anyone else waits on this page until you let that person in, the same as a stranger messaging your Telegram bot. Mail that cannot be shown to come from the address it claims is ignored; mail forwarded through a mailing list or a forwarding service often fails that check.

When a mail doesn't show it was written to Moe, Outlook, Hotmail, Microsoft 365 and Yahoo never sign that, and a blind copy is never in the To line, Moe emails the address it came from: Did you send this to Moe?, with its subject, first lines and a code. Reply YES within 30 minutes and Moe reads it; reply NO, or ignore it, and Moe never does. A late answer is told the question has expired. Replies in a conversation with Moe don't ask: every email Moe sends ends with a short reference, and a reply to it within three days from the same address is read without asking. Moe never reads its own words back out of your quote of them. If an email from your own address can't be checked, Moe doesn't read it and the row tells you why.

What Moe sends, and what it never does. Moe replies only to the person who wrote, in the same thread, and never copies anyone else in. It writes first only to you; to anyone else it only replies, within three days of their last email. At most 50 emails a day, and 20 a day to any one address. An address that bounces or marks Moe's mail as spam is never written to again. Moe ignores automatic mail, out-of-office replies, newsletters, no-reply senders, so two robots never write to each other. A long answer arrives as one email; if Moe is still working two minutes after it started, you get what it has so far and the rest follows in the same thread. Moe sees attachments' names and does not open them. When Moe needs your OK for something while answering an email, it doesn't ask by email, and that step isn't done; the row tells you, so you can ask again from your Mac.

What is kept. Your email conversations with Moe are kept like any chat's. Moe's cloud keeps the subject of the last email in each conversation, encrypted, for up to thirty days, so replies stay in the thread. Resend, the service that receives and sends the mail, keeps a copy of received mail in its own records. This address is separate from connecting your own Gmail, which lets Moe read and send from your address; neither affects the other.

Strangers wait for you#

Anyone can message a bot, so a chat Moe does not know does not get answered: it waits, and the row says who is asking, with Approve and Not now. Until you approve, their message is received and nothing is sent back. Approving once is enough; after that the chat has a thread of its own. While a chat is waiting, Moe keeps its id, whatever the sender calls themselves, and when they last tried, enough for you to decide who they are; it does not keep what they said.

What arrives in the chat is Moe's answer#

When you message Moe on any of these, what comes back is the answer, not a running commentary on how Moe got there: no tool names, no step counts, no notes written for the people who build Moe. If something genuinely takes a while, Moe says so in its own words, an account of the work rather than a stock line. Interrupting still works: send something while Moe is busy and it changes what Moe is doing, without an announcement. On your Mac, the chips under Moe's reply and what it says out loud as it goes are unchanged; that is Moe's own screen, where seeing the work is the point.

When your Mac is closed#

With Away, one bot and one conversation: you message Moe on Telegram, or Slack, or Discord, and if your Mac is awake it answers, and if your Mac is closed your cloud computer answers instead, and you cannot tell which. Your cloud computer carries Telegram, Slack, Discord, LINE, WhatsApp Business and Email Moe. Signal and the WhatsApp you scanned a code for are links to your phone that cannot move, so those two stay on your Mac. Everyone you had already let in stays let in.

Discord, and a Slack app of your own, travel too. Neither will deliver a message to an address you hand it, so Moe's cloud opens a connection out to each and holds it, using the key you gave Moe when you connected the app. Moe will not call either of them connected until the app itself has accepted that connection; while that is still coming the row says so, and it corrects itself with nothing for you to re-run.

When your cloud computer is the one answering, the row says so. Handing a chat app to your cloud computer takes it off your Mac on purpose, so the row reads Connected — your cloud computer answers Telegram, so it keeps working while this Mac is closed, and Check again agrees with it. The whole of it is under Away.