Sending email

The inbox is in the sidebar under Inbox. It is shared: everyone in your workspace looks at the same conversations, so nothing has to be forwarded for a colleague to read along.

The layout

On the left are three mailboxes: The team's inbox, Assigned to me and Archived. Above the list you filter with All, Unread, Recent and Starred, and you can search by subject or contact. Filter narrows the list to one source or one colleague, and you can sort newest or oldest first.

A conversation bundles everything exchanged with the same person about the same subject. A reply from the customer joins that conversation rather than starting a second thread.

Picking up a conversation

Open a conversation and you will find Assignee in the top right. Assign it to yourself or to a colleague so it is clear who has it. When you are done, Archive puts it away; if an answer arrives later, Reopen brings it back.

Replying

The composer sits at the bottom. You pick the channel there. You can send by Email and through the chat widget on your own site; an Internal note is the third option and never reaches the customer, only your team. A form submission is inbound only, so you answer those by email.

The fields are From, To, Cc, Subject and the message body. The sender address is fixed for the rest of the conversation. That is deliberate: a reply from a different mailbox would arrive at the other end as a brand new conversation.

You also get:

• Attach for a file.
• Insert snippet for a piece of text you use often.
• Preview to see what the recipient gets, including your workspace layout.
• Send now or Schedule, where you pick the date and time yourself. A scheduled send can be cancelled right up to the moment it goes.

Starting from a contact

The detail page of a contact has a conversations panel with a button to start a new one. If you have several mailboxes, you choose which one the conversation leaves from.

When mail arrives from somebody you do not know yet, the conversation is marked as an unknown contact, and you can create a contact or link it to an existing one. Everything in the conversation moves across with it.

Templates, layouts and snippets

Settings → Email is where you decide what your mail looks like.

• Templates are whole messages with a subject and a body. You can send yourself a test before using one.
• Layouts are the wrapper around every message: your logo, your colours, your footer. A layout without a content block or without an unsubscribe link cannot be saved, because the first would drop the text of your messages and the second would leave the recipient no way out.
• Snippets are loose pieces of text you call up in the composer.

There is also a list of the messages that go out automatically, for instance the moment you send a quote or an invoice. You can rewrite those and, with one click, go back to the standard text.