Stay Informed
Dex watches your calendar, inbox, LinkedIn and messages so you don't have to. Below is everywhere that information reaches you: the Home page you open in the morning, the emails Dex sends, and the updates that land on individual contacts.
Home is the one page that answers "what does today look like?". It builds itself from your connected accounts, in this order:
- Calendar events: today's meetings from your connected Google or Outlook calendar.
- Resurface: a past contact worth reconnecting with, chosen by relevance rather than by a schedule you set. To be reminded about someone on a rhythm you choose — everyone you haven't spoken to in six months, say — set a keep-in-touch frequency on them instead; Resurface skips contacts that already have one.
- Birthdays: whose birthday it is today.
- Keep-in-touch: contacts you're due to reach out to, with their frequency and the date they came due.
- Reminders: one-time and recurring reminders that are due.
- Network updates: LinkedIn title changes, and a prompt to connect LinkedIn if you haven't.
The right-hand rail keeps a running picture of recent activity: Recently interacted, Recent LinkedIn connections, Recent notes, and a shortcut to your map.
Dex sends a small number of emails. Here is the full list and what triggers each one:
| When it arrives | What's in it | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily digest | Every morning, 8:30am your time | Today's keep-in-touch suggestions, birthdays, calendar events, and reminders |
| Weekly digest | Sundays | Upcoming reminders and birthdays for the week ahead |
| Resurface email | Every morning, 7:30am | Past contacts worth reconnecting with |
| Keep-in-touch reminders | The morning a contact is due | The contacts you said you wanted to stay in touch with |
| Pre-meeting brief | About 10 minutes before a meeting | Attendees, recent emails, past meetings, and your notes on the people in the room |
| Calendar smart reminders | On the year anniversary of an event | A nudge about a meeting worth marking a year on |
| LinkedIn title changes | When a connection changes their job title | Who moved, and what they moved from |
| Conversation summaries | Nightly | A recap of what Dex wrote into your timeline from synced messages |
| CC/BCC confirmation | Each time you CC or BCC your Dex address | The contacts Dex linked that email to |
A few things worth knowing:
- The digest replaced the old birthday emails. There is no longer a separate birthday notification setting. Birthdays arrive in the daily digest on the day, and in the weekly digest ahead of time.
- Resurface is configurable. Under the Resurface reminders card you can set how far back Dex looks (Resurface time) and how many people it suggests at once (Resurface number). Those settings are shared with text-message reminders, so changing one changes both.
- Pre-meeting briefs need Google sync, and LinkedIn title changes need LinkedIn sync.
- Keep-in-touch is spaced out. Dex won't send you more than five keep-in-touch notifications in a day, however many frequencies you set at once. See Keep-in-Touch.
Never miss a birthday. Birthdays reach Dex two ways: you add one by hand on a contact, under Contact info → Add birthday, or an import brings it in. The Facebook import carries birthdays automatically, and a CSV import can include a Birthday column.
To see them all, open Contacts → Birthdays in the sidebar, or go to the Birthdays page directly. Birthdays are grouped by month so you can look a season ahead.
You'll hear about them without checking the page:
- Today's birthdays appear in the Birthdays section on Home.
- They're included in the daily digest on the day.
- The weekly digest lists the ones coming up that week.
With LinkedIn sync running, Dex keeps your network current on its own. The sync runs every 3-5 days, so updates arrive in batches rather than the moment they happen.
Title Changes
Title changes show up under Network updates on Home, and by default also come by email. Turn the email off with the LinkedIn title changes toggle in notification settings. Archived contacts are generally left out.
New Connections
New connections are synced into Dex as contacts and listed under Recent LinkedIn connections on the right side of Home. These are in-app only. Dex no longer emails you about each new connection.
Connecting Google or Outlook is what turns a contact record into a history you can actually read.
Open any contact and you'll see:
- Recent interactions: the latest email threads and calendar events with that person, newest first.
- Last interaction: updated automatically from those emails and meetings, which is what keeps keep-in-touch reminders honest.
- Timeline: the full record, with filters for what you want to see.
Sync is near real-time once the initial backfill finishes, and you can open a full email thread from the mobile app as well as the web.
Non-Gmail and Non-Outlook Accounts
If you're on a mail provider Dex doesn't sync with, you can still log the conversations that matter by CC'ing or BCC'ing your personal Dex address. See CC/BCC email.
Two features turn conversations into notes without you typing them.
Granola Sync
Granola sync files the summary of each meeting Granola recorded onto everyone who attended, and creates contacts for people you hadn't met before. The first sync covers your last 30 days, then Dex checks every 4 hours.
Conversation Summaries
Conversation summaries run nightly across your synced WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Instagram messages, writing what was said into a note on each contact's timeline and emailing you a recap. One toggle, Conversation summaries, controls both the notes and the email.
The Timeline page is every note, meeting, and reminder across all your contacts in one reverse-chronological list. It's the place to go when you know something happened recently but not who it was with.
Use the icons above the feed to sort, filter by type, or search across everything at once.
Network Insights
Network → Insights answers the slower questions: where your network works, where they studied, where they live, and who your strongest connections are by interaction count. It's a good quarterly read rather than a daily one.
FAQ
Check Settings → Account → Notifications first, since each email type has its own toggle. If those are on, check your spam folder and, on a work address, whether your mail admin filters automated mail.
Some emails also depend on a sync: pre-meeting briefs need Google sync, and LinkedIn title changes need LinkedIn sync.
That's the weekly digest, subject line "Your week in Dex". It goes out Sunday morning US Pacific time, so depending on your timezone it can arrive late Sunday or early Monday. It looks forward, at the week ahead, rather than reporting on the week just gone.
It contains up to three sections, and any section with nothing in it is left out entirely:
- Birthdays coming up in the week ahead.
- Reminders due in the week ahead.
- Keep in touch — contacts you're due to reach out to.
It's separate from the daily digest, which arrives every morning and covers that day only. The weekly digest is on by default for everyone; turn it off with the Weekly digest toggle under Settings → Account → Notifications.