Email and the inbox
Email in Sonta lives next to the records it is about. You connect your own mailbox; incoming mail becomes a conversation linked to the contact it came from, and you reply, assign, and prioritize from there. Who sees a conversation follows who owns its contact — the inbox is not one shared pile — and outgoing mail can be sent by hand or from an automation.
Most tools treat email as a place you go — a separate inbox you check, apart from where your customer records live. Sonta does the opposite: email comes to the work. Connect your mailbox, and an incoming message becomes a conversation attached to the contact it came from, sitting on the record it concerns. Replies go out from your own mailbox, and the whole exchange stays next to everything else you know about that person. This guide covers how mail comes in, who can see it, how you handle it, and how it goes back out.
Connecting a mailbox
Email starts with your real mailbox, not a new address. You connect it by authorizing Sonta to use it — a standard sign-in with your provider, with Gmail available now and more on the way. Once connected, outgoing mail is sent through that mailbox, so what your customers receive comes from you, not from a generic system address. If teammates need to work the same mailbox, you can share it — but sharing grants the ability to send and manage, not a window into conversations that are not theirs to see. Who reads what is a separate matter, and the next two sections are about exactly that.
Inbound mail becomes a conversation
When a message arrives, Sonta does not drop it into one undifferentiated pile. It opens a conversation — or continues an existing one — and links it to the contact the mail is from. Mail from someone who is not yet a contact still lands, held apart until you place it. Each conversation keeps its full thread of messages and a running trail of what happened to it — assigned, replied, resolved — so the history of a relationship is in one place, not scattered across personal inboxes. Because a conversation is tied to a contact, email stops being a channel of its own and becomes part of the record, the same way a deal or a booking is.
Who sees what
This is the part that makes a team inbox workable rather than chaotic: visibility follows ownership. You see a conversation if you can see the contact it is linked to — because you are assigned to it, because you own that contact, or because it sits in an unowned pool anyone can pick up. It is the same access model that governs the rest of your records, applied to mail: the person who owns the relationship sees its correspondence, and others do not by default. If a conversation seems to be missing, it usually is not gone — it belongs to someone else. The mechanics of owners and roles are covered in how access works.
Handling what comes in
Working the inbox is a few plain moves: assign a conversation to whoever should own it, set its priority so the urgent rises, and set its status as you move it from open to resolved. One of these carries more weight than it looks: transferring a conversation is not merely handing off a thread — it is handing off the customer, so it moves the underlying contact's owner as well. Reach for transfer when the relationship should change hands, and assignment when only this one exchange should.
Sending mail back out
Replies and outgoing messages go out from your connected mailbox, and you rarely write them from scratch. Templates hold the messages you send often, and they can merge in details from the record — a name, an amount, an appointment time — so a standard message still reads as specific. You send by hand when a moment needs a person, and you let an automation send when it should be routine: a welcome on a new contact, a reminder before a booking, a follow-up after a stage change. That last path is where email meets the rest of your operation, and it is covered in agents and automations.
A worked example
A customer replies to a quote. Their message lands as a conversation on their existing contact, and because they already have an owner on the sales team, it routes straight to that person — nobody else has to notice or forward it. The owner answers from a template that pulls in the quote's details, marks the conversation resolved, and moves on. A day later, an automation watching that contact sends a short follow-up, from the same mailbox, without anyone lifting a finger. One thread, one owner, one record — email, triage, and automation all working the same contact. Swap the quote for a support question or a booking enquiry and the shape holds.
Where to go deeper
Email leans on the rest of your setup: the data model for contacts and records, how access works for who sees which conversations, and agents and automations for sending on autopilot. The step-by-step pages — connecting a mailbox, building templates, replying, triaging, linking mail to records, deliverability, and handling unsubscribes — each have their own place in this section.