> ## 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 > Outbound emails the platform sends, plus customer replies routed back to your inbox. 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. ## 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. ## 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. ### 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. ## What a reply triggers A customer reply isn't just logged — it nudges you to respond: * **Active follow-up sequences pause.** If the contact was in a proposal follow-up or lead-nurture sequence, their reply stops the remaining steps so you're not auto-messaging someone who's already talking to you. * **You get notified.** An in-app notification (the bell) fires for org owners and admins. * **A follow-up task is created** so the reply doesn't fall through the cracks. If your account has **email AI auto-reply** enabled, the AI Receptionist handles the response instead (subject to your [AI reply mode](/tasks-and-workflows/workflows#ai-reply-mode)) — see [Limitations](#limitations-today) below. ## 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 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. ## 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. ## 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. ## Limitations today * **Email AI auto-reply is opt-in and platform-configured.** Out of the box, inbound email replies are surfaced for you to answer (with the notification + task above) rather than auto-answered. If your platform/agency enables email AI auto-reply for your account, the AI Receptionist drafts or sends responses to inbound emails too, honoring your [AI reply mode](/tasks-and-workflows/workflows#ai-reply-mode). (Customer replies via SMS are auto-answered by default.) * **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. ## Next How two-way SMS conversations work. The unified conversation list.