Your inbox

A channel is an address the team works together — support@acme.example, sales@acme.example. Everyone sees it, everyone can answer it, and the conversation stays in one place whoever picks it up.

A personal mailbox is yours — sam@acme.example. It is created and handed to you by an admin, on a domain your team has verified, and it works like any other mailbox you have used: your mail, your drafts, your read and unread.

Both kinds live on your own verified domains. Personal mailboxes are assigned by an admin rather than claimed, so the addresses on your company's domain stay your company's. Ask an admin for one; you cannot make your own.

An admin administers the list of addresses — creating a mailbox, assigning it, narrowing a channel, closing one — and reads every channel. An admin does not read anyone else's personal mailbox.

One personal mailbox is included on every plan, whichever plan you are on. Each one after that is $5 a month, added when the mailbox opens and dropped when it closes, so you pay for the mailboxes you actually have. Answering a channel counts against your plan's emails the way any other message you send does; mail you send from your personal address does not — see pricing for the plan it sits on.

Trash is a holding place, not a shredder. A conversation you delete sits there for 30 days and can be put back; it still counts against your storage until it goes. Delete forever and Empty trash are the ones that do not come back.

Snooze a conversation to hide it from your Inbox until later: later today, tomorrow, this weekend, next week, or a time you pick. It comes back unread at that time, or sooner if a new reply arrives. Snoozes are yours alone; a colleague's Inbox is unchanged.

• Snoozed has its own list, under the Inbox, in the order things come back. Unsnooze any of them to have it back straight away.
• The conversation does not move. If you archived it before you snoozed it, it comes back in the Archive — snoozing hides it from your Inbox, it does not file it somewhere.
• Times are your computer's. “Tomorrow at 8” means 8 in the morning where you are. Mail comes back within a few minutes of the time you chose.

Answering a channel thread, you choose who it comes from: the channel itself, or your own address. Either way the customer's next message comes back to the channel, because a reply sent from your address carries the channel as the address to answer. That is deliberate: a conversation the team owns should not quietly become one person's, and nobody should have to wait for you to come back from holiday.

• The conversation does not move. It stays in the mailbox it arrived at, whichever address you answered from.
• Everything you send is a normal message. The same checks, the same record, the same delivery events as anything you send through the API.

By default, a message to an address on your domain that no mailbox claims still reaches you: it lands in a catch-all rather than being turned away, so a customer writing to a name you never set up is not silently lost. An admin can turn that off per team, and then mail to an unknown address is recorded as not delivered rather than kept. See Receiving for how mail gets to your domain in the first place.

A label is a colour and a name you put on a conversation, and a conversation can carry as many as you like. Pressing one in the sidebar shows everything filed under it, wherever those conversations have got to — a label is a second way to read your mail rather than a place to move it to, so filing something leaves it exactly where it was.

There are two kinds, and which one you are making is the only choice you have to think about. Team labels belong to everyone: anybody can put one on a conversation in a shared mailbox, and an admin makes and changes them. A team label can be limited to one channel, if it only makes sense there. Your own labels are yours: you make them, you are the only person who sees them, and they go on the mail in your personal mailbox.

Select conversations in the list and press the tag button to file several at once, or use the same button while reading one. Labels in the sidebar is where you make, rename, recolour and delete them. Deleting a label takes it off every conversation and leaves the conversations alone.

A rule sorts mail as it arrives: match the sender, the recipient, words in the subject or the message, or an attachment, then archive it, mark it as read, label it, or send it to spam or trash. Rules run in order and the first match wins. Admins set a channel's rules; you set your own for a personal mailbox.

Open a mailbox's … in the sidebar, then Manage rules. Every condition you fill in has to hold — a rule with a sender and a word matches only messages with both. Leave a box empty and it is not part of the rule.

A new rule only sorts mail that arrives after you write it. To catch what is already there, pick Run on existing mail from the rule's menu: it works through the conversations in that mailbox, skipping spam and trash, and tells you how many matched. Earlier rules are not re-run.

Search reads subjects, the people on a conversation and the words in the message itself — not just the subject line, so a phrase you half remember is enough. Narrow it with from:, to:, in: for a folder, mailbox: for one mailbox and label: for one label, and quote a phrase — or a label name with a space in it — to match it whole.

Press ? anywhere outside a text box to see this list without leaving the app. If you would rather the keys did nothing, switch them off under Preferences in the account menu — that choice belongs to this browser, so it does not follow you to another machine. Escape and ⌘ or Ctrl + Enter keep working either way: those two belong to whatever panel or message you have open rather than to the shortcuts.

A key that acts on mail acts on whatever you have selected, and on the conversation your keyboard is sitting on when you have selected nothing.

Every mailbox can answer for itself while nobody is reading it. Open the mailbox's settings from the … beside it, turn Vacation responder on, and write a subject and a message. A first and last day are optional: leave the first empty to start now, leave the last empty to keep replying until you turn it off. Days are counted in UTC.

A channel's responder is a team admin's to set, because a channel speaks for everyone who reads it. Your own mailbox is yours, and nobody else can write an away message in your voice.

While it is on, each message that reaches that mailbox is answered once — and then the same person is left alone for four days, however many times they write. Nothing automatic ever gets a reply: not a mailing list, not another away message, not a bounce, and not a message our filters put in Spam. An address on your suppression list is skipped too, unless the only reason it is there is that they unsubscribed from a newsletter.

The reply comes from the same address your own reply would come from, lands in the conversation like any other message you sent, and counts the same: one email on your plan from a channel, and one of a personal mailbox's 500 a day. There is a banner across the top of your Inbox for as long as a responder is on, with End now on it — because the one thing a responder must never do is keep announcing a holiday you came back from.

Closing a personal mailbox frees its address straight away, so it can be handed to whoever takes the work over, and stops its $5 a month. The mail is a different question and gets a different answer: an admin is given a download of it, good for seven days, and the contents are kept for 30 days in case that download is needed again, then deleted.

Mail is never handed on with the address. The next person to hold sam@acme.example starts with an empty mailbox, because the messages in it were written to Sam.