Email Rules
Routing inbound email by sender, domain or subject — handing off, tagging, forwarding, ignoring and marking as spam before the bot sees it.
Not every email to your support address is a support request. Suppliers, recruiters, invoices, marketing, legal notices and automated system mail all arrive at the same inbox, and none of them should be answered by a bot.
Email rules act on inbound mail before it becomes a normal conversation. Each rule matches on the sender or the subject and applies one action.
Settings are under Settings → Help Desk → Email Rules.
What a rule matches on
One condition per rule:
| Type | Matches |
|---|---|
| The exact sender address. Comma-separate to match any of several addresses in one rule. | |
| Domain | The part after the @. Exact — example.com does not match mail.example.com. |
| Subject | Any subject line containing your text, case-insensitively. |
Domain values are matched exactly as written, so keep them lowercase.
What a rule can do
| Action | Effect |
|---|---|
| Hand off | The conversation is created open and already handed off. The bot never answers it. |
| Mark as spam | The conversation is created closed, handed off and tagged as spam. It stays searchable but never enters a queue. |
| Ignore | Nothing is created at all. The email is dropped. |
| Forward | The email is forwarded to an address you specify, attachments included, and no conversation is created. |
| Add tag | The conversation is created normally, with your tag applied. |
Choosing between them
Hand off is the workhorse. Use it for anything that must reach a person and must not be answered automatically — your legal address, your wholesale contacts, a specific escalated customer, a partner who expects a named human.
Ignore is for mail with no support value at all: automated bounces, monitoring alerts, newsletters you can't unsubscribe from. Be careful — an ignored email leaves no record anywhere.
Forward is for mail that belongs to another department. Invoices to finance, CVs to recruiting, press to marketing. It leaves your support queue entirely without anyone triaging it by hand.
Mark as spam keeps the record while keeping it out of queues, which is the difference between it and Ignore. Prefer it when you might later want to prove an email arrived.
Add tag doesn't change routing at all — it classifies. Tag your wholesale domains, your marketplace notifications, or a specific brand's inbound, and you have a view and a reporting line for free.
How several rules interact
Rules are evaluated in a fixed order rather than one you control:
- Ignore — if one matches, the email is dropped and nothing else runs.
- Forward — if one matches, the email is forwarded and nothing else runs.
- Hand off — marks the conversation for handoff, then continues.
- Mark as spam — applied when the conversation is classified.
- Add tag — every matching tag rule applies.
So Ignore beats Forward, and both beat everything else. Hand off, spam and tags stack: one email can be handed off and pick up three tags.
Within each action, domain rules are checked before address rules, and address before subject.
What a hand-off rule also does
Marking an address for hand-off has two side effects worth knowing:
- The email won't be merged into an existing conversation. It always starts a fresh one. That's usually correct — a supplier writing twice about different orders shouldn't become one thread — but it does mean these conversations don't accumulate history the way customer email does. See Email auto-merging.
- Spam detection is skipped. A person is handling it, so the classifier doesn't run.
It also makes the conversation eligible for the autoresponder, since it's now handed off.
Scope
Rules apply to one business by default. When your organization has more than one, an Apply to organization switch extends a rule across all of them — right for things like a legal address or a shared supplier that are the same everywhere.
Rules match on the sender and subject only, so they apply to every inbox of the business in scope. There is no way to limit a rule to one mailbox.
A starting set
Most teams end up with something close to this:
- Hand off — your legal, press and wholesale addresses.
- Hand off — any partner or supplier who expects a named person.
- Forward —
invoice,receiptandbillingsubjects, to finance. - Ignore — monitoring and automated system senders.
- Add tag — your marketplace notification domains, so they're filterable.
Add rules as the pattern appears rather than up front. The ones you need are visible in a week of reading your own inbox.