# 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](/docs/glossary/autonomy/) rule, and mail arrives and leaves through the mailbox rather than through the workspace in general.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Channels:** email
- **In the app:** #/mailboxes
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/mailbox/

## 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](/docs/glossary/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.

> **Careful** *Connected* and *healthy* are different claims. A mailbox whose credential has expired, whose sync cursor has stalled or whose sends are failing can still show as connected, which is why mailbox health is reported separately — see [mailbox health](/docs/email/mailbox-health/).

## Mailbox, identity, channel, route

**Not an [identity](/docs/glossary/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](/docs/glossary/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](/docs/glossary/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](/docs/email/mailbox-disconnect/) 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.

## Related

- [Channel](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/channel/)
- [Identity](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/glossary/identity/)
- [Mailboxes](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/email/mailboxes/)
- [Mailbox roles](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/email/mailbox-roles/)
- [Mailbox health](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/email/mailbox-health/)

## What this page is based on

- `backend/app/identity.py` — the three mailbox roles and their labels
- `backend/app/mailboxes.py` — the single-primary rule on promotion
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §5 — endpoint scope; `docs-source/facts.py` CHANNELS.email