📄 Set up your AI provider
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📄 Set up your AI provider

Set up your AI provider

This is the one-time setup step that activates the MailDesk AI Assistant. After this you (and your team) can run Summarize, Draft and Security Scan on any email.

⚠️ Setting up AI providers is an administrator task. Individual users do not enter their own API keys.


Before you start

You need:

  • Administrator access in your Odoo

  • At least one provider account (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek) or a self-hosted endpoint URL

  • An API key from your provider (typically a long string starting with sk-... or similar)

Don't have a key yet?

Each provider has its own sign-up. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini all have a self-service portal where you create an account, add billing, and generate an API key. The key is what you paste into MailDesk.


Step 1 — Open AI provider settings

  1. Open Settings in Odoo

  2. Scroll to the MailDesk section

  3. Find the AI Providers sub-section


Step 2 — Enter your API key

  1. Choose your provider from the list (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Custom)

  2. Click Set API key

  3. Paste your key

  4. Save

💡 The key is masked once saved — you cannot retrieve it back from MailDesk. Store your key securely in a password manager or your provider's portal.

Step 3 — Choose your default provider

Pick the provider you want MailDesk to use by default. You can also override the default per operation — for example, use Claude as the default but Gemini for Security Scan.

  • Default provider — used unless an operation has its own override

  • Per-operation provider (optional) — Summarize / Draft / Security Scan / Ask AI / Editor


Step 4 — Test the connection

Click Test connection next to your provider entry. MailDesk sends a short health-check call and reports back. You should see ✅ Connected.

If the test fails, see the troubleshooting block below.

Self-hosted provider (Custom)

If you want all AI processing to stay on your own infrastructure, choose the Custom provider:

  • Set your endpoint URL (any OpenAI-compatible API, for example a local Ollama server)

  • Set the model name your endpoint exposes

  • Set an authentication key if your endpoint requires one

No email content leaves your network when you use a self-hosted provider.

If the test fails

  • Double-check the key — copy-paste freshly from your provider portal (no leading/trailing spaces)
  • Check that your Odoo server has outbound internet access to the provider (corporate firewall / proxy may block it)
  • For self-hosted providers, confirm the endpoint URL is reachable from your Odoo server (not just your laptop)
  • For OpenAI, confirm your account has billing set up — free trials are limited
  • For paid keys, check your usage quota with the provider


✅ Once the test passes, the AI Assistant is live for every mailbox user in your Odoo. Try it: open an email and look for the AI actions.