# Needs You is empty and something is wrong

Needs You raises what something knew to raise: actions held for a decision, questions Connect could not settle, and operational faults it can detect. It does not raise work that never began, a limit that is a number rather than a fault, or a judgement about something already sent. An empty list means no open item, not that the business is being served.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **In the app:** #/needs-you, #/autonomy-audit, #/billing, #/mailboxes
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/troubleshooting/needs-you-empty/

## What the symptom looks like

The queue is clear and something is still wrong: a customer says they never got an answer, a week has passed with no outbound activity, or a channel has been quiet longer than the business is. Nothing is flagged, so there is nothing to click, and the natural conclusion — that Connect thinks everything is fine — is the wrong one to act on.

The queue is a list of open items, not a monitor. It answers 'what needs a person', and it is exact about that. It does not answer 'is everything working', and treating it as though it did is the mistake this page exists for.

## What Needs You covers

- Held actions: anything `ask_before_send` stopped, with the conversation it belongs to.
- Questions the engine could not settle from knowledge or memory, phrased as the decision they want.
- Operational faults it can detect — a mailbox that stopped fetching, a line whose health has fallen, an integration that disconnected. Voice line health is read live rather than stored, so its entries appear and drain on their own.
- Follow-ups on the `task` channel, which are work for a person because no drain will ever send them.

## What it deliberately does not cover

| Situation | Why the queue is quiet | Where it does show |
|---|---|---|
| A channel set to `off` | No work is prepared, so nothing can be held | What Connect May Do — the mode is the whole story |
| A channel set to `draft_only` | The mode prepares and stops without asking, by design | The conversation itself, and the decision log |
| A spent daily allowance | A limit reached is a number, not a fault | Plan & Usage, against the day's figures |
| A lapsed plan | The workspace's commercial state is not an operational item | Plan & Usage, and the plan pages |
| Nobody wrote to you | Nothing arrived, so nothing was missed | Conversations — an absence of inbound is visible there, not here |
| A poor answer that was sent | It succeeded; nothing detected a problem with it | The conversation and the decision log; quality is a human judgement |

> **Note** Two of those are worth memorising because they cause most of the confusion: `draft_only` holds without asking, and a spent allowance is a number on a usage screen. Neither is a fault, and neither will ever queue an item however long you wait.

## What Connect did complete

- It fetched, canonicalised and filed everything that arrived on a connected channel, whatever the outbound mode was.
- It recorded every decision it made in the period, including refusals and including actions it took without asking.
- It drained the operational entries whose causes had cleared, which is why an earlier item may be gone rather than lost.
- It ranked what remained by the cost of delay, so an empty list is genuinely empty rather than filtered.

## What Connect did not complete

- It did not raise an item for a channel it was told not to work on. `off` and `draft_only` are instructions, not faults, and a queue that argued with them would be useless.
- It did not detect a provider that is accepting mail and delivering it nowhere; a mailbox can be healthy by every check available and still be in trouble at the far end.
- It did not judge the quality of anything already sent. Nothing re-reads a sent reply and decides it was wrong.
- It did not raise the absence of inbound work. Nothing knows how much mail you should have received.

## Where to look instead, and when to escalate

1. Open the decision log for the quiet period.
   - Result: Refusals and held actions are both recorded there. A period with no entries at all is a much stronger signal than an empty queue.
2. Open What Connect May Do and read the mode per channel.
   - Result: Most extended silences are a mode somebody set deliberately and nobody remembers.
3. Open Plan & Usage.
   - Result: A spent allowance or a lapsed plan explains outbound silence without producing a single queue item.
4. Open the mailbox and phone screens and read health directly.
   - Result: Health is shown there in full; the queue only escalates what crosses a threshold.

Escalate when the decision log is empty for a period in which mail demonstrably arrived. That combination — inbound present, decisions absent — is the one shape here that configuration does not explain.

## Questions

### Should the queue ever be empty?

Often, yes. A workspace running `autonomous` on channels that are working well produces very few items, and that is the intended state rather than a warning sign. The reading only becomes unsafe when it is used as proof that nothing is wrong anywhere.

### Can I make the queue raise more?

Indirectly: narrowing autonomy to `ask_before_send` puts more decisions in front of a person. That is a real trade — more oversight, slower replies — rather than a monitoring setting, and it is worth making on purpose.

### Does an operational item come back if I fix the cause badly?

Yes. Those entries are derived from the underlying health rather than stored, so a mailbox that reconnects and fails again raises the item again. A recurring entry is a signal about the fix, not about the queue.

## Related

- [Needs You](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/needs-you/)
- [What appears in Needs You](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/needs-you-kinds/)
- [Working the Needs You queue, end to end](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/workflows/needs-you-triage/)
- [The decision log](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/autonomy/audit-trail/)
- [Usage and allowances](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/account/usage/)
- [Mailbox health](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/email/mailbox-health/)
- [Connect appears to be doing nothing](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/troubleshooting/nothing-is-happening/)

## What this page is based on

- Connect source pack §5 — what Needs You carries and how entries drain (`docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md`)
- Connect source pack §7 — `task` follow-ups are work for a person
- Connect capability registry (`docs-source/facts.py`) — `needs_you`, `mailbox_health`, `line_health`, `billing_usage`