# The people outside the memory

The owner looked at a new REM notebook and asked where everyone was. The first
five-day trial had been narrowed further for a page test: `--first-people 0`
meant it wrote no person memories at all. Removing that cap would still not
answer the larger question. The normal map read only ninety days of mail, and
one short exchange did not earn a Markdown page. Those contacts existed in
private metadata but disappeared from the People view.

Making a page for every address would repeat an earlier failure. A real
notebook once held hundreds of empty person templates, including newsletters
and the owner's other inboxes. A mail header is evidence that an address was
seen; it is not proof of who a person is, or what the relationship means. The
new directory keeps those claims apart. A person REM has written about remains
in the main table. A one-off correspondent can be found in a separate,
searchable list, marked as an unreviewed contact, with a terminal command to
prepare a memory when the owner recognizes them.

The history question has a cost before a model writes anything. An isolated
metadata-only scan of one connected Outlook account traversed its available
years since 1970 in 461 seconds, but Gmail timed out before its address list
was read. REM called that first result a lower bound. After the Gmail path
switched to bounded direct metadata reads, the two-mailbox scan finished in
844 seconds. It observed 22,411 headers and mapped 634 People records and ten
projects. Another 803 low-signal contacts stayed searchable for review. Both
providers reported zero incomplete windows. The directory still explains
coverage because a later mailbox or time window can fail. A timed-out window
is split, and any day still unavailable is recorded rather than counted as
scanned.

The combined map offers 589 person investigations, eight projects and the
owner's page. The current defaults estimate 660 million billed input tokens
and about 297 minutes for those 598 pages with ten workers. Adding mapped
organizations and installed Skills brings the selected queue to 886 pages,
751 million input tokens and 364 minutes. There are no completed page samples
in this isolated notebook, so those are planning numbers, not promises or
weekly quota percentages. The configured investigation target is advisory;
the weekly safety floor still stops new model work. REM can show the forecast
without a model turn or a
historical body archive. After a foreground init, it also offers the source
and schedule approval needed for nightly upkeep without repeating the first
batch. A full all-person run and claim-by-claim review remain separate work,
because finding an address is only the start of remembering a person well.