Last checked: 7 October 2026 (buyer terms and news quoted on this page)
Chat is how a team talks to itself. Email is how a company deals with everyone else: suppliers, partners and customers. That makes it valuable to AI buyers, and it makes customer email the hardest part of any deal.
Quotes, negotiations, approvals, deliveries and complaints all leave an email trail.
Most of the work a company does with the outside world runs through Gmail or Outlook. A supplier sends a quote, someone pushes back on price, a manager approves, a purchase order goes out, a delivery slips, and the problem gets resolved. Each step is a dated message with a sender, a recipient and often an attachment. Put together, that is a complete record of how a business transaction actually happens, which is what AI labs want models to learn.
Gmail and Outlook both appear in the lists of systems that buyer programs publish. micro1's page names project histories and "decision-making patterns" among what it wants. In the reported deals, email sits at the center. Google agreed to pay $10 million in Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy proceedings for internal data that included emails, Teams messages, spreadsheets and operations files, as reported by ABC, TIME and others in August 2026. Forbes reported in April 2026 that shut-down startups were selling old Slack and email archives, and Troveo cites roughly $10,000 to $100,000 per archive deal in that closure market.
Those figures come from closed companies and a bankruptcy. A running company's email is a different situation, with customers who are still customers. Nobody can price your archive without seeing it.
A thread often runs from first request to final resolution, with every step dated.
Email goes back further than most chat tools. Mode asks for several years of records the company owns.
Quotes, spreadsheets, reports and signed agreements show the output behind each message.
Email is more deliberate than chat: how to decline, escalate, apologize or negotiate in writing.
Five messages, one piece of work. This is the shape buyers look for.
Illustrative and fictional. All people, companies and amounts are invented and shown after de-identification.
We need 400 units of the replacement part by the 20th. Can you quote with and without expedited shipping?
Quote attached [FILE: quote.pdf]. Expedited adds roughly 9% and guarantees delivery by the 18th.
Can you split it: 150 expedited, 250 standard? We only need the first batch early.
Approved the split order. Please attach the revised quote to the PO so the three-way match clears.
Batch two arrived with 12 damaged units. Photos attached. Please credit or replace before we close the PO.
A buyer sees a request, an offer, a counter-proposal, an internal approval tied to a finance control, and an exception that needs handling. That chain, repeated across thousands of threads and linked to the purchase order in your accounting system, is worth far more than the same messages scattered across unrelated inboxes.
Sorting threads by who is on the other side is the fastest way to scope an archive.
| Thread type | Typical value | Privacy and contract risk | Common approach |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internal only | Approvals, handoffs, planning | Lower employee data; HR topics mixed in | Include by mailbox and topic, exclude HR, legal and leadership |
| Vendors and suppliers | Quotes, negotiation, delivery exceptions | Medium vendor contracts may include confidentiality terms | Include after checking key supplier agreements |
| Customers and clients | Service, complaints, deliverables, renewals | Highest third-party personal data, NDAs, professional duties | Separate decision with a lawyer; often excluded or tightly limited |
| Automated and bulk mail | Close to none | Low but adds noise and tracking data | Filter out notifications, newsletters and system alerts |
General information, not legal advice. Talk to your own lawyer before you sign.
Your employees at least work for you. Your customers never agreed to anything. A customer thread can hold their name, address, account numbers, complaints, and sometimes health or financial details. Quoted replies pull older messages into every new one, and signatures repeat phone numbers hundreds of times. Even with de-identification, the content may describe a client's confidential business in enough detail to recognize it.
Contracts add a second layer. B2B clients often have NDAs or confidentiality clauses. Law firms owe attorney-client privilege, accounting firms owe professional confidentiality, and companies serving consumers may fall under GLBA (financial) or HIPAA (health). GDPR applies to EU and UK contacts, and CCPA/CPRA to California residents. Our page on client confidentiality and data sales covers what can never be included. micro1's page states that no customer information is exposed, as published; ask any buyer how that is achieved and verified on your own sample.
You choose the mailboxes and dates. The buyer runs the export and de-identification under the agreement.
Shared mailboxes for purchasing, operations or project delivery often hold the cleanest workflows. Choose by process, not by person.
Mailboxes, date ranges, approximate message counts, and which thread types are excluded. No content yet.
Practitioners advise sharing a manifest and samples, never the full archive, before there is a price, and getting more than one offer.
A Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 admin authorizes access to the agreed scope only. Mode describes buying "an agreed copy"; originals stay with you.
Mode says it de-identifies before onward delivery. micro1 says sensitive information is scrubbed and originals deleted after processing.
The buyer checks the delivery against agreed criteria. Practitioners cite 60 to 90 days from first contact to close.
Described in general terms. Tools, editions and admin roles differ, so confirm each point with whoever runs your email.
Describe your archive against these signals in the manifest. They describe usefulness, not price.
| Signal | Stronger | Weaker |
|---|---|---|
| Mailbox structure | Role or shared mailboxes tied to one process | Scattered personal inboxes with mixed topics |
| Thread completeness | Both sent and received sides retained | Only sent items, or only the inbox |
| Time depth | Several continuous years | Gaps from server moves or mailbox deletions |
| Human share | Mostly written by people | Mostly notifications, newsletters and receipts |
| Links to records | Threads reference purchase orders, tickets or contracts | No connection to other systems |
| Language | Primarily English, which micro1 lists in its eligibility | Mixed languages without a clear majority |
Walk through this inventory before you agree a de-identification plan. Every line needs an owner and an answer.
Most problems in email deals start in scoping, not in the contract.
A manager's inbox mixes every topic they touch, including HR and personal mail. A shared purchasing inbox holds one process end to end.
Newsletters, receipts and alerts can be a large share of any mailbox. Quote counts only after bulk mail is removed.
An "internal" thread with one customer copied in is a customer thread. Filter on every address field, not only the sender.
Internal threads carry forwarded customer messages, salary questions and sick-day notes. Internal is lower risk, not no risk.
Old PST files and departed staff mailboxes surface late and stall the export. Inventory them on day one, or exclude them.
Have someone who knows your clients read the de-identified sample. Automated tools miss context that a person spots at once.
Choose periods on purpose. Date ranges are a scoping tool, not just a volume figure. Years with a stable team and a stable process show the clearest workflows. Some stretches are worth leaving out even in a good mailbox: months covered by a legal hold, a dispute with a major client, a restructuring, or an acquisition that brought in another company's mail. Write each excluded range into the manifest with a one-line reason. A buyer reading that list sees a seller who knows the archive, and your lawyer sees a scope that can be explained later if anyone asks why a particular period was shared.
Only what each program publishes. Ranges cover whole data packages, not email alone.
| Program | Published payout | Published eligibility | Notes for email sellers |
|---|---|---|---|
| micro1 Enterprise Data Partnership | "$100k+ qualified" to "$1M+ highly unique"; referral page "$100K-$2M+ for approved data packages" | 30+ employees, documented processes, modern software tools, primarily English; US prioritized | States scope agreed in writing and no customer information exposed |
| Mode company data | "$100K-$5M" | 20+ full-time US office employees; accounting firms 10+; law firms 6+; several years of owned records | Buys "an agreed copy"; de-identifies before onward delivery |
| Grepped | "$20K-$5M", "get paid in 7 days" | Any vertical | Confirm scope, timing and payment terms in your own agreement |
Last checked: 7 October 2026. Sources: micro1.ai/data-partnerships and micro1.ai/company-referral; data.mode.inc; grepped.ai, each as published. Published ranges are not offers, averages or promises. Compare all programs on the buyer programs comparison, or test your headcount and country in the eligibility checker.
Independent site. Some links are referral links: if your company signs with a buyer through them, the buyer may pay us a fee. You are not charged, and we never see your data.
Answer each line in writing. Gaps here become problems at acceptance or later.
Buyer programs list Gmail and Outlook among the systems they take data from, and Spirit Airlines' internal emails were part of the data Google agreed to buy in its bankruptcy, as reported in August 2026. Whether you can sell depends on ownership, your client contracts, employee policies and privacy law. This is general information, not legal advice.
Customer threads contain personal data and confidential details of people and companies who never agreed to anything. Contracts, NDAs and professional rules may forbid disclosure even after de-identification. Many sellers start with internal and vendor threads and treat customer threads as a separate, lawyer-reviewed decision.
Shared role mailboxes and the mailboxes of teams that run a repeatable process (purchasing, operations, project delivery) usually carry the clearest workflows. Leadership, HR, legal and finance mailboxes are usually excluded. Choose by role and process, not by person.
Nobody can price yours without seeing it. Troveo cites roughly $10,000 to $100,000 per archive deal in the shut-down startup market. Buyer programs publish ranges for whole data packages, such as Mode's "$100K-$5M". These are published ranges, not offers or averages.
Often they hold the actual work: quotes, spreadsheets, signed agreements and reports. They also hold the densest personal and client data. Decide in writing whether attachments are in scope, which file types, and how they will be de-identified.
If your offboarding policy kept them, they are company records like any other mailbox and get the same scoping and de-identification. Check first whether they still exist and in what form, and remember that notice to former staff is harder to give. Ask your lawyer what your policies and local law require.
They often come along with a mailbox export. Invites show meeting patterns and who works with whom, but they also carry attendee lists, locations and dial-in details. Decide in writing whether they are in scope and how attendee data is handled.
Do it before, not after. Once a copy is delivered, removing a client depends on the deletion terms in your agreement. Agree client exclusions before export, check the deletion clauses, and ask how deletion of the copy is confirmed.