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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.servicebooked.ca/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Email is the fourth channel that lands in your Inbox alongside chat, SMS, and voice. Both outbound (emails the platform sent on your behalf) and inbound (replies from customers) appear as rows on the same conversation list, grouped by contact.

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Outbound emails

Every email the system sends — appointment confirmations, reminders, review requests, manual sends from a contact’s page — gets logged on the customer’s timeline and shows up in the inbox. You see:
  • Contact name as the row label
  • Email badge in green
  • Subject as the preview (“Your appointment is confirmed”, “Reminder: tomorrow at 9 AM”)
  • Time sent in the row’s timestamp
Outbound emails are always visible — no setup required.

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Customer replies (inbound)

When a customer hits Reply to one of your outbound emails, the reply lands in the same inbox row. You’ll see:
  • Reply badge instead of the standard “Email” tag
  • A small ↩ arrow on the preview line (”↩ Reply: Sounds good, see you Monday”)
  • The reply takes priority on the row — so a contact whose most recent activity is an inbound reply jumps to the top of the list
This is how you know there’s something waiting for you to respond to. A scan of the inbox tells you which customers have replied and need attention.

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How replies thread to the right contact

The platform matches incoming replies by the customer’s email address. As long as their email is on file (set during booking, form submission, or manual entry on the contact page), the reply lands on the right contact’s row. If a customer replies from a different email address than the one we have on file (e.g., a personal account vs. work account), the reply may not thread automatically. In that case, you can find it via the platform admin’s “stray emails” log and re-attribute it to the right contact.

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What customer replies don’t do

  • They don’t go to your personal inbox unless you’ve configured a Reply-To address (Settings → Business → Email sender → Reply-To). By default, replies are captured by the platform’s inbound webhook and surfaced in the dashboard inbox only.
  • They don’t auto-trigger workflows. A reply doesn’t, for example, automatically create a task or send a follow-up. The inbox is the surface; you decide what to do with the reply.
  • They don’t include attachments yet. If a customer replies with a photo, only the text portion of their reply is captured today. Attachment handling is on the roadmap.

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Setup (for platform admins)

Inbound email is configured at the platform level (your hosting/agency setup), not per business. If you operate the platform, the steps are:
  1. Set up an inbound MX record for a subdomain (e.g., inbound.yourplatform.ca) pointing at your email provider’s inbound MX servers.
  2. Configure the provider (Resend, Postmark, or SendGrid) to forward inbound emails to the platform’s webhook URL: /api/webhooks/email/inbound/{token} where {token} matches the EMAIL_INBOUND_WEBHOOK_TOKEN environment variable on the deployment.
  3. Test by sending a reply to one of your outbound emails — it should appear in the inbox within seconds.
Once this is set up at the platform level, every business using the platform automatically gets inbound-reply support — no per-business configuration needed.

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Composing email manually

You can send a one-off email to a contact from their contact detail page → Send email. These also appear in the inbox under the contact’s row.

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Limitations today

  • Send-only auto-reply isn’t wired yet. The AI doesn’t auto-respond to inbound emails — it’s a manual workflow, not an AI workflow. (Customer replies via SMS DO get auto-responded by the AI.)
  • Email threading uses the customer’s email address as the sole match. Replies from a different address than the one we have on file will be dropped or land on a different contact.
  • Quoted history in replies is preserved verbatim — we don’t strip the “On Jan 1 at 9 AM, you wrote…” block. The preview truncates at 120 chars so it’s not visually noisy.

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Next

SMS replies

How two-way SMS conversations work.

Inbox overview

The unified conversation list.