Email - Unthread

Unthread allows you to relay support emails to your Slack channel, and you can respond to customers directly from Slack. This means you never need to open Outlook or Gmail again 🙌 Head over to “Settings” > “Email” from your Unthread dashboard, and then keep reading!

​🛠 Setting up the connector The first step is to forward messages from an email address into Slack. That way, your entire team has context, and you can use assignment rules to notify the right responder. ​Set up email forwarding First, choose a name for the support email group, something like “ Support” will do just fine! Then, add the email address that you use to receive support emails. You should have already set this up via your email provider. Lastly, set up email forwarding to the Unthread email that’s in the dashboard. This is the trickiest step! Follow these steps to enable forwarding, depending on which email provider you use:

Gmail / Google Workspace

Please follow the instructions under “Forward messages with address maps”. The instructions under “Forward messages with Gmail automatic forwarding” are not currently supported.

Outlook / Microsoft 365

​Choose a Slack channel Select a channel from the dropdown, and the email contents will be posted there. For your channel to appear, it must be an internal channel (not a Slack Connect or shared channel). ​Set up assignment rules Inbound emails can have their own assignment rules that you configure on this page. This is important because the email may not match an existing customer, so you’ll need to determine how to assign those messages. ​📨 Managing emails in Slack Once setup, you’ll start seeing email content posted directly to your Slack channel. How great is that! ​Tracking & assigning new messages You’ve already set up the assignment rules in the first step, new emails are tracked just like any other message. This means you can set up escalation paths & SLAs, triage messages with your team, and more. When a message is assigned to you, it will be in your Inbox. New messages will use the 📩 icon to indicate that the message is from an inbound email.

​Discussing internally Unthread will create a thread for the inbound email where you can discuss things internally. By default, all comments in this thread are private and not shared with the customer. You’ll see a message like the one below posted with any new email.

This is the good stuff and allows you to talk with customers without ever leaving Slack. Compose your message in the thread that Unthread has created for you, and when you’re ready to send, include “/unthread send” at the bottom of the message.

When you include this, the message will be sent to the customer in the same email thread, and anyone cc’ed on the message will automatically be included. Here’s how that very reply will look to the customer in the email that they receive:

Pretty nifty, eh? ​Analytics You’ll get the same great analytics on response rates and resolution times that you get with other messages. In your analytics page, you’ll see email responses broken out based on the name that you give your support team in the first step. This allows you get reports on email response rates regardless of whether the person you’re speaking with is a known customer or not.