The shared inbox

Read and answer your organization’s email inside pplCRM, with every conversation attached to the right person.

5 min read

The Inbox is a full email client inside the CRM. The difference from a personal mailbox: conversations connect to contact records, so an exchange with a supporter shows up on their profile’s Emails tab, context nobody has to forward around. When you open a conversation, a person context rail on the right shows who you’re talking to: their tags, issues of interest, and a link straight to their record.

The shared inbox is a Grassroots feature

Connecting a real Gmail or Microsoft mailbox needs the Grassroots plan or higher; the demo workspace’s sample inbox is included free so you can try it. If a workspace moves to the Free plan, the inbox locks immediately, sync stops, and the synced email is permanently deleted 30 days after the downgrade — upgrading within that window restores everything, but after it the mail cannot be recovered (your originals stay in Gmail or Microsoft either way). See Plans and billing.

The Inbox belongs to your active campaign

Each campaign connects its own mailbox and has its own Inbox. Connect an Office 365 or Gmail account while a campaign is active and its mail syncs into that campaign; switch campaigns (from the avatar menu) and both the connected account and the visible mail switch with it. Connect a separate account under each campaign that needs one. Connecting under one campaign never touches another’s.

A healthy inbox rhythm

Answer oldest first. Each open conversation shows an SLA pill with the time left to reply (it turns amber as the deadline nears, red once it’s overdue), and the Dashboard rolls breaches up into a status.
Scan the list by status. Each row carries a chip: Unassigned (needs an owner), Assigned, or Closed. Assigning a conversation to a teammate notifies them in-app and by email (each tunable in their personal notification settings); assigning to yourself stays silent.
Watch your own queue. The Inbox entry in the sidebar carries a badge with the open conversations assigned to you — the same count as the Mine triage folder.
The Triage rail on the left starts collapsed to an icon strip so the conversation list gets the room; hover it to read the folder names, or click the » button in its header to pin it open. Your choice is remembered on this browser.
Sync now pulls new mail and reports what changed; the line beneath it shows when the inbox last synced.
While replies are sending, the top bar shows a sending indicator with a count; you can navigate away freely.
Notifications alert you to activity that needs you. Tune them under Settings in the avatar menu.

Work it like Gmail

The inbox answers to Gmail-style keys: c compose, r reply, e mark done, s star, j/k next and previous, # delete, and more. The full table is in Keyboard shortcuts, or press ? right in the inbox.

Where the response target comes from

Administrators set the email SLA in working hours (plus the working days and business hours that count) under Workspace → SLA Configuration. See The dashboard and SLA health.

What syncs, and what doesn’t

Connecting a mailbox pulls the last 48 hours of Inbox, Sent, Trash and Spam, and everything after that arrives as it lands. It deliberately does not import your archive: mail from months ago has already been dealt with, and importing it would drop thousands of already-handled messages into your open queue on day one. Connecting takes seconds rather than hours as a result. Your old mail stays where it is, in your mail client.

Attachments download when you open them

Small files come across during the sync so messages render complete. Anything larger is listed with its name, type and size, and is fetched the first time someone opens it — then kept, so the second open is instant and the file survives the original message being deleted. If the mailbox has since been disconnected, or the message deleted upstream, an unopened attachment can no longer be retrieved and the inbox says so.

Spam is visible but never opened

Messages your mail provider flagged as spam still sync, so a wrongly-flagged supporter is not invisible to you — you see the sender, subject, body and what was attached. Their images and attachments are never downloaded, because pulling junk-mail payloads onto our servers would mean storing and serving whatever is in them. If a spam message is genuine, move it out of spam in your mail client; it returns here on the next sync with everything available.

Archiving in your mail client tidies up here too

When you archive a message, move it to another folder, or let a rule file it, it leaves this inbox on the next sync — the same tidy-up, in both places. What you added here is not thrown away with it: comments, the person it was assigned to, its open or closed status and its star all stay on the message, and any link to it (an assignment email, a mention, an activity entry) still opens it. An assigned or starred message also stays on Assigned to me and Favourites, so archiving it upstream never quietly clears somebody’s list. Messages that left the mailbox and that nobody here ever commented on, assigned, closed or starred are cleaned up after 90 days.

Re-syncing

Re-sync recent mail, under the mailbox settings, resets the sync position and pulls the last 48 hours again. It is for when a sync failed or looks incomplete. Older mail already in your inbox is untouched.

Try this on sample data.

Every feature in the docs is live in the free demo workspace — no card, nothing to lose.

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