Email arrives in the department inbox alongside every other channel. This is about sending it.
Sending uses your own account
Composing an email sends it through your connected Google or Microsoft account, not through a separate system pretending to be you.
That matters for three reasons. It arrives from your real address, so it does not land in spam and does not confuse the recipient. It appears in your own sent folder, so your mail client and the platform agree about what you sent. And it is logged against the record here, so your colleagues can see it.
You need to connect an account first. If you have not, the composer says so plainly rather than failing after you have written the message, and points you at Apps and Import to connect Google or Microsoft. It takes about a minute and only has to happen once.
If you have more than one account connected, you pick which one sends.
Composing
To, subject, body, and Cc and Bcc, which stay collapsed until you ask for them because most messages do not need them.
Attachments are supported, though for anything living in the platform a link is usually better than a file. A linked document stays current; an attached copy starts ageing the moment it leaves.
Keep the formatting light. Business email is read on phones and in preview panes, and a message with three font sizes and a coloured heading reads as marketing rather than correspondence.
Shared addresses and personal ones
Two quite different things arrive as email.
A shared address is your organisation's: sales, support, accounts. Anybody in the relevant department sees it and can answer it.
A personal address is yours, connected from your own profile, and is what the composer sends from.
The distinction matters for who is expected to answer. A thread on a shared address with no owner is exactly what the unassigned bucket exists to surface, and the reason a busy support address needs somebody doing a triage pass rather than everybody watching it.
Configuring addresses, routing rules and your own sending domain is administrative and lives in Operations.
Signatures
Built once, applied to what you send. There are four layouts.
Standard, a photo with your name, title and a contact stack beside an accent bar. The default, and right for most people.
Compact, a single dense line. Best on replies, where a four-line signature under a two-line answer looks absurd.
Banner, a full-width logo with your name and role below. Right where the brand is doing work, and heavy everywhere else.
Minimal, name, title and one email line, no logo.
Whichever you pick: include a phone number. The most common reason a customer emails again instead of calling is that they could not find one. And keep it short, because a signature longer than the average reply is a signature people learn to scroll past.
Threading
Replies stay on the thread, so a conversation stays one conversation.
Reply rather than composing a new message on the same subject. A new message starts a second thread, the two then diverge, and that is the second most common way a customer ends up with two different answers.
Drafts
A written and unsent message sits in drafts and is visible to your department.
That is deliberate for a shared inbox. A draft nobody can see is a reply that may never go, and a colleague who can see one in progress knows not to write their own.
What to send from here and what not to
Send from here anything about a customer, a deal, a ticket or an invoice. It belongs on the record, and the next person to open that record should find it without asking you.
Do not send from here internal conversation. That is what Sync Chat is for, and internal chatter mixed into a customer's history makes that history much harder to read later.
Do not send bulk mail from here. A message to many people at once is a campaign, and it belongs in Marketing where consent, unsubscribes and deliverability are handled properly. Sending a hundred individual emails from a personal account is also the fastest way to damage your domain's reputation.
When email is the wrong channel
Email is the default for business correspondence and the wrong tool more often than people admit.
Anything needing a decision from three people turns into a thread with four replies and no decision. A fifteen-minute call settles it.
Anything going badly gets worse in writing. Two people being careful with wording is two people reading each other's caution as coldness.
Anything urgent is not urgent by email. Somebody who needs an answer this hour should be called, and somebody sending an urgent email at six in the evening should be told to call next time.
Anything internal belongs in Sync Chat, where it is faster and does not clutter a customer record.
What email is genuinely good for: a record, a considered answer, something the recipient needs to keep, and anything that has to reach somebody in a different time zone.
The one that catches everybody
A reply sent from your own mail client is invisible here. It reaches the customer and not the record. The thread will look unanswered to everybody else, and somebody will answer it again.
Worth saying to new joiners explicitly, because their instinct is to open the mail app they have used for a decade. The habit takes about a week to change and saves an argument a month.
Getting a reply
Say what you need in the first two lines. Everything below the fold is optional as far as most readers are concerned.
One question per message. Two questions reliably get one answer, and it is usually the easier one.
Put the deadline in the sentence, not at the end. "Before Thursday" in the first line gets acted on; the same words in a closing paragraph do not.
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