Bring your team mail into IoTReady

A shared mailbox is a team address - orders@, support@, recruiting@ - whose mail lives in your workspace. Staff read it, assign it, tag it, answer it and link a thread to any record, like the order it’s about, all in the portal.

There are two ways to get your mail in. Pick one per mailbox.

	Auto-forwarding	IMAP and SMTP
Setup	Add a forwarding rule to your existing address	Give the workspace your mail server and a password
Replies go out as	The workspace address, like [email protected]	Your own address, like [email protected]
You hand over	Nothing but a copy of incoming mail	A mailbox password
Arrives	About a minute after it’s sent	Within the polling interval, a minute by default

If you can live with replies coming from the workspace address, forwarding is the lighter option. If customers must see your own address, use IMAP and SMTP.

An administrator sets either one up under Mailboxes in the admin area of your workspace.

Auto-forwarding

Your workspace gets an address of its own for each mailbox, in the form <name>+<workspace>@iotready.app. For a workspace called acme and a mailbox called orders, that’s [email protected]. You keep your own address and forward it there.

1. As an administrator, create a mailbox in your workspace and choose the hosted transport. Give it a name, such as orders. The workspace shows you its address.
2. In your mail provider, add a forwarding rule from your own address to that address. Keep a copy in the original mailbox if you want a safety net.
3. If your provider asks you to confirm the forwarding address, it sends a confirmation to the new mailbox. Open the mailbox’s page in the admin area: the confirmation code and link show there for 14 days. Gmail works this way.
4. Send a test message to your own address. It shows up in the mailbox.

Replies from the workspace go out as the hosted address, and customers who reply to them land back in the same thread. Delivery shows on the thread: “Delivered”, or “Not Delivered” with the reason.

IMAP and SMTP

Use this when replies must go out from your own address, or when you’d rather the workspace read the mailbox directly. It works with any provider that offers IMAP and SMTP: Fastmail, Zoho Mail, a server you run yourself, or Gmail with an app password.

You need:

• the IMAP and SMTP server names, like imap.example.com and smtp.example.com
• the user name, usually the full address
• a password for the mailbox. Use an app password if your provider has them, not the password the person signs in with.

Then:

1. As an administrator, open Mailboxes and create one with the IMAP + SMTP transport. Enter the two server names, the user name and the address.
2. Enter the password. The workspace keeps it encrypted and never shows it again.
3. Press Test. It connects, signs in and opens the folder without reading any mail, and tells you which step failed if one does.
4. Set how many days back the first read should go (Backfill days; 0 means from the beginning of the mailbox) and save. That older mail comes in first, then new mail as it arrives.

Connections are encrypted. Ports are 993 and 465 unless you pick STARTTLS. If you leave out the SMTP server the mailbox receives mail but can’t send.

Two options help when the mailbox isn’t a clean one:

• Folder names the folder or label to read, so a filter at your provider can fill it with just the mail you want. The default is the inbox.
• Recipient filter keeps only mail addressed to the addresses you list, for a personal mailbox that also receives the team address.

The workspace never marks anything read on your server.

Who can see a mailbox

Not everyone in your workspace. Access comes from roles: an app’s role can give read or write access to a mailbox, and administrators always have it. Give the team that role and they see the mailbox in Mail in the portal.

Help

Write to [email protected].