A customer emails your support address. Who answers, and where does the next teammate find the history? Inbox gives your team one place to manage that conversation. We'll follow an email from arrival to assignment, reply and closure. This is shared team communication. Email Sync, covered next, connects your personal mailbox and saves emails to contact records.
First, your account needs an Inbox plan, and each user who needs access needs an Inbox license. The account owner chooses the plan and users. A channel is how messages arrive; an inbox is the queue your team works from. Several channels can feed one inbox.
You can use the default inbox. For a separate Support queue, go to Inbox, Settings, Inboxes, then New inbox. Name it, choose a default assignee or Unassigned, and save. We'll choose Unassigned so the team can distribute work.
Go to Inbox, Settings, Channels. You can edit the default email channel or create one for support. Name it, choose Email, route new conversations to Support, choose the send-from setting, and save. An autoresponse is optional. You can also create a team signature under Inbox settings, Email signature, then enable it on the channel.
The channel provides an address for forwarding. At your email provider, forward your support address to that channel address using Ontraport's Email forwarding for Inbox guide. Don't use the example address shown here. Each team's role address can forward to its own channel. That is what brings incoming support emails into your shared queue.
Now our customer's email arrives in Support. Open Inbox, filter to that inbox, and open the conversation. With our Unassigned setup, the first person to reply is assigned automatically. You can also change the assignee from the conversation's top controls, or move it to another inbox if a different team should handle it. Read the thread and check the contact details and notes on the right before replying.
Type your reply at the bottom and add anyone who needs the response to CC. Review the recipients and message, then send. Email conversations support attachments, images and formatting. Click an image in a conversation to open its fullscreen preview.
Sender details start collapsed; expand them to see To, From and CC while the subject stays visible. The channel's send-from setting also determines the name customers see beside the reply-to address. An unassigned message has no reply-to name; with Custom, the selected From name user determines it.
Once you've resolved the booking question, close the conversation from its top controls. Closing isn't erasing the history. The contact log has a conversation entry; open its details and choose View conversation to return to Inbox. That gives the next teammate the context without asking the customer to start over.
So: forward your team address into a channel, route it to the right inbox, assign the work, reply with the right people included, and close it when resolved. Next up: Email Sync integration, for connecting your personal mailbox.