A mailbox of your own

Separately from the shared address above, you can connect your own mailbox under Settings, Mail and Calendar. It takes an IMAP mailbox with a password, or a Gmail account signed in with Google. A Gmail mailbox has to be signed in with Google rather than given a password, because Google stopped accepting account passwords for mail in 2022. Each person connects their own and only ever sees their own mail, whatever their role.

Each mailbox has two switches, for the emails that arrive and for what you send. Either can be turned off without disconnecting the mailbox, which matters because follow-up sequences send through the same connection.

Each mailbox also has a Read now button, which opens it immediately and says what it found rather than waiting for the next pass. How long each kind waits can be set per mailbox too. Left blank it is an hour for arriving mail and a day for what you send.

A mailbox that stops being readable tells you. After a day of failing, the person who connected it is told, and the card says what to do rather than repeating the mail server's wording. After a week the company's admins are told as well, since by then the mailbox has been dead long enough that somebody else should know.

What it watches for is a client who has written to you and has not been answered. After an hour with no reply you are told once, and the email appears on the Email tab under My Tasks with how long it has sat. Home shows the count and links there. Who counts is the people and addresses on the client record, and further addresses or a whole domain can be added to any client. A generic domain like gmail.com is refused, because it would claim every personal address at once.

Each mailbox chooses how wide it looks, under Settings, Mail and Calendar. Clients only is the default and how every mailbox starts. Clients and the people below adds a list of addresses and whole domains kept on the mailbox itself, for a prospect, a supplier or a recruiter who is not a client, so nobody has to create a client to be reminded. Anyone watches every sender except automated mail: newsletters, mailing lists, auto-replies and no-reply addresses are left out. On a busy inbox Anyone can put a lot on Home, which is why it is not the default. An alert from somebody who is not a client is named by the sender rather than by a client.

Only the headers are read: who wrote, the subject, and when it arrived. The body of your mail is not stored, and reading it does not mark anything read in your own mail client.

The subject is a link to the email itself. A Gmail mailbox opens in Gmail on that one message. Any other mailbox hands the message to the mail application on the computer, which is Mail on a Mac. An Outlook or Microsoft 365 mailbox cannot be linked yet.

A waiting email leaves the list in one of three ways. Answering it in your own mail client clears it within a minute or two. Dismissing it says it needs no answer. Making a task from it fetches that email at that moment, keeps what was written as the description and attaches any files that came with it; the task goes to the client's project when they have exactly one, and to your own list otherwise.

The mailbox is watched in both directions, and the Email tab keeps the two apart. The second list is the emails you sent that nobody answered. An email of yours that asked for something and has had no reply for a day appears there with how long it has waited. A question mark counts as asking, and so does asking without one, such as let me know, could you, any update or please confirm. Mail to your own teammates is left out, because that conversation already has a home in the app, and so is anything sent to an address that never replies. These clear themselves when the person writes back, and they take the same dismiss and make-a-task actions as the others.

Whether an email was asking for anything is judged from what you wrote, so it is sometimes wrong. Those rows carry a second action, Not a question, beside Dismiss, and the difference between the two matters. Dismiss means you have dealt with it. Not a question means it should never have been flagged, and that is the one the watcher learns from. Hovering it says which phrase caught the email.

Say Not a question twice about the same phrase and that phrase stops flagging your mail. It stays switched off for you alone, because one person's "let me know" is a real request and another's is a sign-off they type on every message. Nobody else's watcher changes because of your corrections, and yours does not change because of theirs.