Use an OpenAI Vector Store

The outcome: someone asks what your return window is, what a plan costs, or whether you ship to Norway — and the draft comes back with your answer, taken from your own documents instead of invented.

This is the option to pick when the material already exists as a corpus — a handbook, a price list, your website — and something else keeps it up to date. For knowledge you write yourself, see Use your atbridge Notes.

Set it up once

You need an OpenAI Vector Store in your own OpenAI account with your files already in it, and OpenAI connected as your provider. Then, in Thunderbird: Settings → AI providers, pick OpenAI, paste the id into Vector store ID (optional). The field saves itself as soon as you click away — changing it later never asks for your API key.

The full walkthrough is in Connect OpenAI.

Tip

Read-only, and nothing is copied. atbridge.ai passes the store’s id and nothing else — OpenAI searches the store inside your own account. atbridge.ai never writes to it, never indexes it, and never copies what is in it. Keeping the store current is your side of it; many people sync one from their website automatically. atbridge.ai reads whatever is in there at the time.

Try this

Nothing about the prompt changes. Write the request you would have written anyway — the lookup happens on its own.

Reply to this asking about bulk pricing. Use our actual tiers, and quote the minimum order quantity.

The answer is grounded in the documents you put in the store, so the numbers are yours rather than a plausible guess.

Where the knowledge shows up

It applies wherever atbridge.ai drafts for you, not just in chat:

• the atbridge AI Chat pane
• the compose window’s Email Compose dock, including Improve Draft, Blend into email and Make Branded Email
• Fast Actions, when Allow nested AI requests in Fast Actions is on

Caution

Two things switch it off without telling you. The provider selected in that surface’s own picker has to be OpenAI — flipping the dropdown to Claude, Gemini or a local model for one reply quietly drops the knowledge base for that reply. And the Codex CLI connector is a different path: it signs in with your ChatGPT subscription and never touches the provider store, so a store id set there is not used. Use the OpenAI provider with an API key when you want your documents.

Variations

Force it to say when it does not know:

Answer only from our documentation. If the answer is not in there, say so and suggest who to ask instead of guessing.

Quote the source back:

Draft the reply, then list which document each figure came from so I can check it before sending.

Branded, straight from the knowledge base:

Write the customer a branded email covering our enterprise tier, pulled from the product handbook. Branded.

How much it costs you

The same one action as any other reply. OpenAI runs the search server-side inside the same request, so there is no second round-trip and no second action against your allowance. The search itself is billed by OpenAI against your own account, like the rest of your usage with your own key.

Where to go next

• Connect OpenAI — the full setup, including where to find the store id
• Answer emails from your knowledge base — how this compares with using your own notes
• From an outline to a branded email — turn the grounded draft into a polished send