Email intake: emails become jobs in the right building
Give each building its own private intake address, forward a mailbox to it, and every email becomes a job in that building. Steps for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
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Email intake turns emails into jobs. Each intake address belongs to one building. Your mailbox keeps working as it does now; it just also forwards a copy of every email to the intake address.
Add an intake address#
- Open Settings › Connections and find Email intake, under the email accounts.
- Press Add an intake address, give it a name such as "Girls' building requests", and pick the building. Jobs go to that building's Main Inbox, or to one manager's personal queue if you choose.
- Operacora makes a private address for it, a long random name ending in
@in.operacora.com. Press Copy. - Forward your mailbox to it, keeping a copy (steps below). Then send a test email to your mailbox: within a minute a job appears in that building's Main Inbox.
Add as many addresses as you need, one per building or more. Turn one off to pause it; removing one makes its address refuse mail from then on.
Microsoft 365 (a shared mailbox)#
Microsoft 365 blocks forwarding to outside addresses by default. Your admin allows it for these mailboxes first, in Microsoft Defender: Policies & rules › Threat policies › Anti-spam, the outbound spam policy, Automatic forwarding rules: On, in a policy that applies only to these mailboxes. Or use a mail flow rule in the Exchange admin center that sends a copy to the intake address.
- In the Exchange admin center, open Recipients › Mailboxes and the shared mailbox.
- Open Mail flow settings › Email forwarding. Turn on forwarding to an external address and paste the intake address.
- Tick Keep a copy of forwarded messages, and save.
Google Workspace or Gmail#
- In the mailbox, open Settings › Forwarding and POP/IMAP › Add a forwarding address and paste the intake address.
- Google sends a confirmation email to that address. It shows up as a job in the building's Main Inbox: open it, use the code or link to confirm in Gmail, then delete the job.
- Choose Forward a copy and keep Gmail's copy in the Inbox. Save. A Workspace admin can use a routing rule instead.
What happens to each email#
- One email makes one job, with the sender's address and the subject. Replies are new jobs too; nothing is merged.
- Long reply chains and signatures are trimmed from the description. The whole original email is kept unchanged as the record.
- Attached pictures are saved with the job. Other attachments are left out for now.
- The same email delivered twice still makes one job.
- Auto-replies, bounce messages and bulk mail are ignored, so two mail systems can never answer each other in a loop.
- The app never replies to the sender, and never follows instructions written in an email.
Texts can become jobs too: see Phone numbers.