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Email channels

Receive email in Desk through your project inbox address or your own support address, and choose how replies are sent.

Updated . 3 min read.

Email is how most conversations reach Desk and how you answer them. There are two ways in and a few ways out. Everything lives under Desk settings → Channels.

Receive: your project inbox address

Every project has its own Formspring inbox address, such as acme-help@in.formspring.io. Anyone who emails it opens a conversation for that project in Desk. Share it, put it on your contact page, or forward a mailbox to it.

You can rename the part before the @ in the "Project inbox addresses" box:

  1. Click Edit next to the address (use Copy address to copy it).
  2. Type a new name. It must be 3 to 40 characters: lowercase letters, numbers and single dashes. Formspring checks that it is free as you type.
  3. Click Save address. The old address keeps working for 30 days, so mail already in flight still arrives.

Some names are reserved (for example support, help and admin), and names are unique across Formspring.

Receive: your own support address

To keep using support@yourcompany.com, connect a mail server you control:

  1. Click Connect an email address.
  2. Paste your Postmark Server API token. Only a workspace owner or admin can do this.
  3. Formspring syncs your confirmed sender signatures. Pick one under Sender, optionally add a Display name and a Default assignee, and click Add address.
  4. Under Forward incoming mail to, copy the address shown and set it as a forwarding address at your mail host (for example in Google Workspace).
  5. Paste the Inbound webhook URL shown under the connected server into your Postmark server's inbound settings. Treat that URL like a password.

Each address shows its state: Receiving and sending, Receiving only (the sender signature is not confirmed yet) or Paused. It also shows whether the sender signature, DKIM and Return-Path check out. If DKIM is not verified, replies may land in spam.

Use Edit to change the name or default assignee, or to Pause, Resume or Remove an address. The Scale plan includes 3 connected addresses.

Send replies

Replies go out from the best option you have set up:

  1. Your connected address, when you have connected a Postmark server.
  2. Resend - click Connect Resend under "Send with Resend", paste your API key, and enter the address to Send replies from (it must be on a domain you verified in Resend). Click Send me a test to confirm.
  3. Your team SMTP - set up under Settings → Email (SMTP).
  4. Formspring's own sender, if nothing else is set up. The sender name ends with "via Formspring".

Customers can always answer an email and the answer lands back in the same thread.

Forms, surveys and pages

Further down the Channels page, the "Forms, surveys and pages" list switches each source of conversations on or off: Form responses, Survey responses with a comment, Funnel leads, Feedback posts, and "Still need help?" on help center articles. When a response has an email address you can answer it from Desk, from your default sender.

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