# Untrusted Intake

> A declared arrival area where outside material lands as untrusted input and never edits current truth on the way in.

**Tier:** 3 · **Normative weight:** implements `TM-EVD-001`; supports
`TM-PUB-006`
**Requires:** nothing

## Problem it removes

Material arriving from outside — an emailed spreadsheet, a form
submission, an exported report — gets applied where it lands. Import *is*
update; a wrong or malicious arrival becomes current truth with no seam at
which anyone could have caught it.

## Mechanism

A declared intake area (`inbox/`, an intake table, a landing bucket) with
one rule enforced at its boundary: admission is not promotion
(`TM-EVD-001`). Arrivals are recorded with who or what sent them and when,
retained in their source form where policy permits, and remain inert until
reconciliation proposes — and review accepts — whatever change they
support. Outside contributions through any published surface return
through the same door (`TM-PUB-006`): an answer or approval is evidence,
never a direct edit.

The intake area's scoped guidance states what may land there and what must
be refused outright, per
[Evidence Hygiene](/docs/truth-machine/kit/evidence-hygiene/).

## Cost

Authoring: a directory and its rules in an afternoon. Per change: arrivals
gain one explicit admission step — the step that was previously implicit
and unguarded. Per session: none.

## Do not adopt when

Nothing arrives from outside the review boundary; all change is authored
in-repository, where Git review already is the intake.

## Evidence

Assessed in [inference-ops](/docs/truth-machine/implementations/inference-ops/)
(inbox for arriving material),
[project-proposals](/docs/truth-machine/implementations/project-proposals/)
(proposal intake and lifecycle), and
[kinra-corpus](/docs/truth-machine/implementations/kinra-corpus/); the
[flow](/docs/truth-machine/implementations/flow/) intake governs customer
documents.

## Template

None — adopted by convention; the arrival area's guidance carries the
rules.

## Related patterns

[Evidence Packet](/docs/truth-machine/kit/evidence-packet/) is what an
admitted arrival becomes when it needs durable identity.