Email

Every workspace owner gets an address on our domain. Forward mail to it from whatever mail client you already use, and your automations receive those messages. This is the other way to do incoming email. The Google integration reads your inbox directly and needs you to connect your account. This one needs nothing from your provider. You decide which mail to forward, and we only ever see what you send us.

​

Find your address

Open Integrations in the dashboard and choose Email. Your address sits at the top of the page and looks like [email protected]. Press Copy rather than typing it out. An address with one character wrong fails quietly, and you find out days later as mail that never turned up. The random part on the end is deliberate. Without it, anyone who knew your organisation name could guess the address and aim their own mail at your automations. Everyone in an organisation shares one address. Working outside an organisation, you get your own. Under the address is either “Nothing has arrived here yet” or the time the last message landed. That one line is the quickest way to tell whether forwarding is actually working.

​

Set up forwarding

The steps below are Gmail’s, because Gmail is the fussiest. It makes you prove you own the address before it will send anything there. Any provider that can forward to an outside address works the same way.

​

When we cannot confirm it for you

Approving normally finishes the confirmation with Google on your behalf. When that fails, the request stays on the page marked Not confirmed and gives you a link to Google’s own confirmation page. Open it and finish it there. Older Gmail confirmations carried a short code instead of a link. If the request shows a code, paste that code into Gmail’s forwarding settings and you are done.

​

Other providers

None of this is Gmail specific. Anything that can forward to an outside address can forward here, and any confirmation it sends turns up under the same Requests tab. Outlook and iCloud ask for no confirmation at all, so with those you just set forwarding and mail starts arriving. For a provider we have not seen before, the request still appears, marked as a guess from the wording. Those messages are handed to your automations as well, because we would rather show you an extra card than quietly swallow a real email.

​

Approve carefully

Anyone who learns your address can point their own mail at it. That is why nothing forwards until somebody signs in and approves it. Before you press Approve, read the mailbox on the request. If you did not just set that address up in Gmail yourself, press Reject. Approving would run a stranger’s mail through your workspaces.

​

Turning it off

Remove the forwarding address at your provider and mail stops. No provider tells us when that happens. There is no notification for it. This is why the page shows you requests and the decision you made on each, and does not show a list of “connected” mailboxes. A list like that could only ever describe the last thing we heard, while reading as a statement about right now. A request is a record of something that happened, so it never goes stale. Where we do have evidence, you get it: forwarded mail names the mailbox it came from, so an approved request tells you when mail last came down that forward. Rejecting a request you have not approved does tell the provider no, where its email gave us a way to say so. And nothing forwards without approval in the first place, so a request you simply ignore is already refused.

​

Ask for the automation

This address is the one mail capability that is always available, so the agent can build on it without asking you to connect anything. It can:

• Read what has arrived, including mail from before the automation existed.
• Send from the address, so replies come back to the same mailbox.
• Reply in the thread, so the person you answer sees one conversation rather than a second one alongside it.
• Handle attachments both ways. It fetches a file that arrived when the job needs the contents, and attaches files to what it sends, up to 10MB a message.
• React to each new message as it lands.

Watch this address for invoices and pull out the amounts.

Email the customer a confirmation when a form comes in.

If you have also connected Google, say which mailbox you mean:

Use my desert address for this, not my Gmail account.

What your automation sees is the same either way: sender, recipients, subject, body, arrival time, and a list of attachment names. The limits are the same too.

​

If mail is not arriving

Work down this list in order. The first two causes account for almost all of it. Forwarding that was set up and later removed looks exactly like forwarding that was never finished, because no provider tells us when it stops. If you have ruled out the steps above, re-add the address at your provider.

​

Worth knowing

• Forward only what you need. Set a Gmail filter that forwards the senders the job cares about, and the rest of your mail never leaves your inbox.
• Each message arrives once. Duplicates are handled for you.
• Forwarding one mailbox both ways is a duplicate. If you have connected Google and forward the same mailbox here, every message reaches us twice. An automation listens to one of these, never both, so nothing is processed twice, but there is no reason to run both.
• Mail can land late. If your workspace was asleep, expect a 10 to 60 second delay while it wakes up.