Capture inbox

A designated intake location for material that has been captured but not yet fully processed into its durable destination.

A capture inbox reduces friction by postponing some filing decisions, while still preserving minimum provenance such as source, time, owner, or project when those details would otherwise be lost. It can be one folder or several channel-specific queues that feed the same processing contract. Items remain unprocessed, not automatically untrusted or low quality.

Builder example

Automated processing can classify, deduplicate, extract, or route captured material, but it needs idempotency, destination rules, provenance, and an exception state. Sensitive channels may require separate access and retention rather than one universal inbox.

Common confusion: A capture inbox is a holding zone, not a finished filing system. What lands there is unsorted and unverified by design. The organizing, tagging, and trust decisions happen in a later review pass, so an item sitting in the inbox carries no authority yet.