Connect OpenAI to atbridge.ai

Prefer to watch? Connect OpenAI to Thunderbird with your API key:

Watch: Connect OpenAI

Once OpenAI is connected, the atbridge AI Chat inside Thunderbird uses GPT to read, search, draft, and organise your email — across every account, on your machine.

Note

Install atbridge.ai and the Thunderbird add-on first — see Install atbridge.ai. New to the in-Thunderbird side? Start with Set up the atbridge extension.

1. Get your OpenAI API key

1. Sign in at platform.openai.com/api-keys.

2. Click Create new secret key, give it a name (e.g. “atbridge.ai”), and copy it. It starts with sk-.

3. OpenAI shows the key once — copy it now; you can’t see it again later.

Caution

OpenAI bills your own account per use. Set a usage limit under Settings → Limits if you’d like a ceiling. atbridge.ai puts no markup on what OpenAI charges. Prefer not to pay per use? Run a model free and locally with Ollama.

2. Add it to atbridge.ai

1. In Thunderbird, open the atbridge Settings — the gear, or Tools → Add-ons and Themes → atbridge.ai → Options (see Set up the atbridge extension). Go to the AI providers tab.

2. Pick OpenAI from the Provider dropdown.

3. Paste your sk-… key into API key. It’s encrypted on this device — your key never reaches atbridge.ai’s servers.

4. Click Connect. The status turns to a green ✓.

3. Pick a model and chat

Open the atbridge AI Chat (the @b button in Thunderbird), pick an OpenAI model from the model dropdown — gpt-4o-mini is a fast, low-cost default; gpt-4o is stronger — and ask away:

“Summarise the unread thread from Maya and draft a reply.”

Tip

You can connect more than one provider and switch in the chat any time — your keys all stay local. Prefer to keep everything on your machine? See Connect a local model (Ollama).

4. Optional — answer from your own knowledge base

If you keep a Vector Store in your OpenAI account — a product catalogue, a support handbook, your website’s content — atbridge can look things up in it while it drafts, so replies to customer mail use your real answers instead of guesses.

1. In the OpenAI dashboard, open Storage → Vector stores and copy the id of the store you want (it looks like vs_abc123…).

2. Back in atbridge Settings → AI providers, with OpenAI selected, paste it into Vector store ID.

3. Click anywhere outside the field (or press Enter). It saves itself — a short Saved. appears underneath. Done: no other change to how you work.

From then on, when a reply needs something from that store, OpenAI searches it and uses the matching passages as it writes. It happens inside the same request, so there’s no extra waiting, and it works in the AI Chat and in the compose dock.

Note

Read-only, and nothing is copied. atbridge only passes the store’s id; OpenAI searches the store in your own account. atbridge never writes to it, never indexes it, and never copies its contents. Leave the field empty to switch the lookup off again — that saves itself too.

Tip

No API key needed to change it. The store id is just an identifier, so it has its own save. Swapping it, or turning the lookup off, never asks you to paste your sk-… key again — only re-keying the provider does.

Tip

Keeping the store up to date is your side of it — many people sync one from their website (for example with a WordPress plugin that pushes pages into an OpenAI vector store). atbridge just reads whatever is in there at the time.

Related

• Connect your AI — overview
• Use the atbridge AI Chat
• Connect Anthropic (Claude)