Mailbox
A mailbox is one email account a workspace has connected — a Gmail account, a Microsoft 365 account, or any IMAP and SMTP server. A workspace may hold several. Each carries its own role, its own signature and its own autonomy rule, and mail arrives and leaves through the mailbox rather than through the workspace in general.
Three roles, and what the role decides#
- Primary
- The official sales identity. New outbound conversations start here unless something else decides otherwise, and exactly one mailbox holds this role at a time.
- Backup
- A connected sender that is not the face of the business. Promoting one to primary demotes the incumbent rather than producing two.
- System
- Internal or automated mail. Useful for keeping notification traffic out of the record a customer's thread reads from.
The role is not decoration: it is read when Connect decides which mailbox a new message goes out from, and it is why a support reply does not leave from the billing address. Which mailbox a reply uses on an existing thread is not a choice at all — it is the one the thread belongs to.
What a mailbox owns#
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| Role | Which mailbox is chosen for a new outbound conversation |
| Signature | What is appended to mail sent from it |
| Autonomy | Whether replies from it send, wait for a yes, or are only drafted |
| Health | Whether it is fetching and sending, beyond merely being connected |
| Sync position | How far through the account's history the fetch has read |
Autonomy at mailbox level is the endpoint scope in the autonomy hierarchy, which is narrower than the channel and wider than one contact. Setting one mailbox to hold everything while the rest send freely is the common shape: the address customers reply to is watched, the internal one is not.
Mailbox, identity, channel, route#
- Not an identity
- An identity is *their* address — one way of reaching a person you correspond with. A mailbox is *yours*. The two are on opposite sides of every message.
- Not a channel
- Email is the channel; a mailbox is one endpoint on it. A rule set on the channel covers every mailbox, one set on a mailbox covers only that one.
- Not the Conversations screen
- The screen shows threads across every connected mailbox at once. Nothing in the interface is a per-mailbox inbox to switch between.
- Not a channel route
- The route says what one of your own channels is *for* — this address takes support, that number is sales. A mailbox can have a role and a route, and they answer different questions.
How many mailboxes a workspace may connect is a plan matter rather than a technical one, and personal and business-domain slots are counted separately — see entitlement.
Questions#
Can two workspaces connect the same email account?
Yes. Mailbox records are unique within a workspace, not globally, so one business having connected an address never stops another from connecting it — the earlier shape of that index was a genuine defect and was fixed.
What happens to the history when a mailbox is disconnected?
The messages already fetched stay as canonical records; what stops is fetching and sending. Disconnecting a mailbox covers what resumes and what does not when it is reconnected.
Does each mailbox need its own Google sign-in?
Connecting a Gmail account is an OAuth grant for that account. Signing in to Connect is a separate thing entirely, and the two are not the same permission.