Turn inbound email into CRM contacts, automatically
- Trigger
- mail forward
- Lands in
- The Contacts dashboard
- Setup
- 2 min
- Needs
- Forwarding rights on the inbox
[email protected] · new enquiry
Pam Beesly at Dunder Mifflin asked about renewing early
- Contact
- [email protected]
- Company
- Dunder Mifflin, inferred from domain
- Status
- Existing customer
- Attachments
- invoice.pdf
Auto-replies, newsletters, and bounces never reach this card, though each one is still logged with the reason it was set aside.
Invite @Via to the Slack channel where you want webhooks to appear. Without this, Viably accepts your webhook but cannot post to the channel.
In the Viably dashboard, open Webhook Relay, choose New endpoint, and pick Inbox. Name it something you can hand out, like Support. The address carries your workspace name, [email protected], and is shown the moment you create it.
Point the forwarding on your current help or sales address at your new Viably address. This works the same way regardless of who manages your domain's mail, whether that is Cloudflare Email Routing, Google Workspace, or Microsoft 365, and your existing setup stays untouched so you keep receiving copies wherever you read mail now.
Send a test email to the address. Within a moment the sender shows up in Contacts, already joined to any lead or payment that shares their email.
You never point your domain’s mail records at Viably. You add a forward, so the address you already publish keeps working exactly as it does now, and Viably simply receives a copy.
Using Cloudflare Email Routing
Most of the domains that reach Viably this way already run their DNS through Cloudflare, so this is usually the fastest path. If your domain sits somewhere else, the same idea applies wherever your provider lets you add a forwarding rule, and only the screen names change.
- 1Open Email Routing for your domain
In the Cloudflare dashboard, select the domain you want to route from, then go to Email, then Email Routing, then Routing rules.
- 2Point an address at your Viably inbox
Add or edit the rule for the address you want to capture, such as
[email protected], and set its action to Send to an email. Enter the inbox address Viably gave you, such as[email protected], as the destination. It is your workspace address with the brand’s name on the end, so you can read it back without looking it up. - 3Verify the destination from your Viably dashboard
The first time you route to a new destination, Cloudflare sends it a one time verification link before it will forward anything there. That link goes to your Viably inbox address, so it arrives inside Viably rather than a mailbox you read yourself. Viably recognises it, keeps it out of your contacts, and shows a Verify with Cloudflare button at the top of your Webhook Relay page. Open that page, click the button to confirm with Cloudflare, and the notice clears itself once your first forwarded email comes through. Verifying an address is a one time step, and every rule you point at it afterward reuses it.
- 4Save and send a test email
Save the rule, then send a message to the address you just routed. It should appear as a new contact in Viably within a moment, and every alias you route the same way, support, sales, or anything else, can share that one inbox or use its own.
Because Cloudflare sends its verification to your Viably address, the link lands inside Viably instead of your own inbox, so there is nothing for you to hunt down and no one to ask to retrieve it. Viably captures the link, tidies it into a single clean button, and places it on your Webhook Relay page ready to click. If you ever request verification again in Cloudflare, the newest link takes the place of the previous one automatically.
How a contact is built
Viably reads the sender, subject, and body of each forwarded email and resolves it to a person. The same contact pipeline that powers your webhook sources handles the email one, so an inbox contact and a form contact are the same kind of row.
Email is the identity key. A June enquiry, a July signup, and an August payment that all carry [email protected] land on one contact row, so the person and the revenue they went on to spend stay in one place rather than three.
Copy your workspace’s shared address on an email you send from your own mail client, either in the To line or on CC, and Viably files that message on the person you wrote to. It is one address for the whole team, [email protected], so nobody has to work out which of your inboxes a particular conversation belongs to before they can log it. Someone already in your contacts has the message added to their timeline as a reply, and someone nobody on your team has heard from before becomes a new contact whose history begins with you reaching out. Answering a customer never turns a colleague into a contact, and a message carrying no recipient outside your workspace is set aside rather than captured. See One address for every customer record, which also covers what happens when you add that address to a calendar invite.
Every contact lands already qualified enough to act on. The sender’s display name becomes the contact name, and their company is inferred from the sending domain, so a cold enquiry turns into a named prospect at a known business without anyone lifting a finger. Freemail domains like gmail.com are left alone, and a role address such as help@ never gets a made-up name, so what you act on is real.
Each message is recorded as a dated event on the contact's timeline, so anyone in your workspace can open a person and read the entire relationship: when they first wrote in, what they asked, and everything that followed. A contact who has already paid is never demoted back to a lead by a later email, so your pipeline always reflects the truth.
Because the email joins across sources, the periodic pipeline report can say how many of the people who wrote in went on to convert, and how much revenue followed, rather than counting enquiries nobody can act on.
Why teams automate this instead of just reading the inbox
A marketing automation platform earns its keep by turning a form fill into a scored lead the moment it lands, and a helpdesk tool earns its keep by turning an email into a ticket someone owns. Both categories exist because a raw inbox does neither on its own. Viably applies the same idea to the inbox you already have, so a person who wrote in about a bug and a person who filled out a pricing form six weeks earlier show up as the same contact when they used the same address, instead of two records nobody thought to connect.
Most tools in this category ask someone to log an email into the CRM after the fact, or wire up an automation platform to do it for them. Viably treats the inbox itself as the trigger, so the contact exists before anyone has to remember to create it.
A marketing team scoring leads and a support team answering tickets usually work out of two different databases, synced badly or not at all. Because Viably already tracks leads, signups, and payments as one contact, whoever answers a support email is looking at the same record marketing captured months earlier.
An enquiry lands in your Slack channel with a Reply button on it. Writing there sends a real threaded email from your inbox address, records the exchange on the contact, and assigns that person to whoever answered, so responding and logging stop being two separate jobs one of which never gets done.
What is captured, and what is not
A real inbox receives more than genuine enquiries, and it receives mail travelling in both directions, so Viably works out what each message represents before it decides whose record it belongs on.
Someone outside your workspace writing to your inbox from a real address, with a subject and a message. The sender becomes the contact, the subject and body are kept on the event, any files they attached are saved to that message, and the send time becomes the contact’s first-seen date.
An email one of your own team sends with your inbox address on it belongs to the customer they wrote to, and is recorded against that person rather than against the colleague who sent it. Viably recognises your team by the accounts linked to your workspace and by the domains you have verified, so nobody has to remember a special address or a particular way of sending. Internal mail that arrives with nobody outside your workspace on it has no customer to file it under, so it is set aside and logged in the same place as anything else that did not become a contact.
Automated and bulk mail that would otherwise flood your list, such as auto-responders and out-of-office replies, newsletters and mailing lists, delivery bounces, mail from unattended system addresses like noreply@, and anything Viably’s host flags as spam or a virus. None of these become a contact, and each one is still recorded in the inbox’s event log with the reason it was set aside, so nothing is filtered without a trace you can review.
If the same message reaches Viably twice, once forwarded and once as the original, it is recorded a single time, so a contact’s event count and revenue stay honest.
See every capture, and everything you filtered
A lightweight CRM is only worth having if you trust what it collected. The inbox has its own page in the dashboard that shows exactly what happened to your mail, so you can publish the address widely and still know where every contact came from.
The page counts the contacts the inbox brought in, how many were people you had never seen before, and how many were mail from someone already in your book. Your acquisition and your ongoing engagement sit side by side, the way a proper CRM would show them.
The spam, bounces, and newsletters Viably held back are counted too, and every one of them appears in the event log tagged with why it was set aside. If a genuine enquiry ever looks like it went missing, you can open the log and see precisely what happened to it.
Inbox captures share the same searchable event log as your webhook and payment relays, so a person’s first email, their later signup, and the payment that followed read as one continuous story rather than three disconnected records.
How Sectors runs support through one inbox
An internal example rather than a hypothetical. This is the exact setup our own Sectors engineering team runs its help and sales inboxes on today.
The Sectors engineering team ran [email protected] and [email protected] the way most small teams do, both addresses forwarded through Cloudflare Email Routing to one person’s personal inbox, with nothing else attached. A returning customer asking about a renewal looked exactly like a stranger asking a first question, because nothing recorded which one they were. The only history of the relationship was whatever the person reading that day happened to remember.
Fixing it took two edits, not a new tool. Both routing rules in Cloudflare were repointed from the personal address to an inbox endpoint minted inside Viably, [email protected], using the same Email Routing screen the team already knew. Nothing about the domain’s DNS changed, and the published help@ and business@ addresses kept working exactly as they always had from the outside.
What changed is what happens after the message arrives. Every sender is now a contact the moment their email lands, matched against the leads and payments Viably already tracks under that same address, so a billing question from an existing customer reads differently from the same question asked by someone who has never paid for anything. The auto replies, delivery bounces, and the occasional newsletter that inevitably reach a public address are filtered out before they can clutter that list, and each one is still logged with the reason it was set aside, so a message that goes quiet is never a mystery.
Answering moved too. Each enquiry now arrives in a Slack channel the whole team can see, and the reply is written straight from that card, which sends a threaded email from [email protected] and records itself on the contact as it goes. Whoever replies takes ownership of that person in the same motion, so the question that used to be answered from one person’s memory is now answered by anyone on the team, from the channel, with the customer’s whole history in front of them.
Yes. Every email forwarded to your Viably inbox address becomes a contact automatically, enriched with a name and company and joined by email to the leads, signups, and payments that person already appears in. That single, unified contact record is the core of what a lightweight CRM gives you.
No. You never point your mail records at Viably. You add a forward from your existing support or sales address, so the address you already publish keeps working exactly as it does today and Viably simply receives a copy.
Yes. Add your Viably inbox address as a destination inside Cloudflare's Email Routing settings, then point a routing rule at it. Cloudflare verifies any new destination with a one time link before it will forward anything there. That link is sent to your Viably address, so instead of asking you to fish it out of a mailbox you do not control, Viably captures it and shows a Verify with Cloudflare button on your Webhook Relay page. You confirm from there in one click, and every rule you point at that address afterward reuses the verification.
Viably reads the sender, subject, and body of each forwarded email, resolves it to a person by their email address, and records the message on that contact's timeline. There is no form to build and no data to copy across, so a lead is captured the moment they write in.
Automated and bulk mail is filtered before it ever becomes a contact, including auto-responders, mailing lists, delivery bounces, and anything flagged as spam or a virus. Each filtered message is still listed in the inbox's event log with the reason it was set aside, so nothing is filtered without a record you can review.
Yes, from Slack or from the dashboard. Each enquiry can post to a Slack channel as a card with a Reply button, and what you write goes out as a real email from your inbox address, threaded so the customer sees one conversation. The reply is recorded on their timeline and the contact is assigned to whoever answered, so nobody replies twice and nothing goes unanswered because everyone assumed somebody else had it.
Yes, and the easiest way is your workspace's shared address, via+<handle>@inbound.viably.app, which is one string for the whole team however many inboxes you run. Copy it onto a reply you are sending anyway and the message is recorded on the timeline of the person you wrote to. Any inbox address here works the same way if you would rather name a specific one. Someone new to your contacts is created from that message, with your outreach as the start of their history, and someone already on file simply has it added to the conversation you were already having. Your own colleagues are never captured as contacts by doing this, so a shared inbox does not slowly fill up with the people you work with. The One Address for Every Customer Record guide covers the shared address in full, including how it works on calendar invites.
Yes. Contacts and their full message timeline are shared across your workspace, so anyone can open a person and read when they first wrote in, what they asked, and everything that followed.
Answer the customer without leaving Slack
Capture is half the job. Pick a channel under Webhook Relay and each enquiry becomes a card there, carrying the sender, their message, and the button that closes the loop. It is one choice for every brand you answer as, because a team watches one place for customers.
Press Reply on the enquiry, write your answer, and Viably sends it as a proper email from your inbox address, threaded so the customer sees one conversation rather than a message from a system they do not recognise. Their follow-up comes back into the same Slack thread, so the exchange stays readable by the whole team.
The dashboard has the same composer sitting under the person’s full history, with the last reply and who sent it shown above the box. Sending assigns the contact to you, which is what keeps two people from answering the same customer twice.
Any files the enquiry carried stay on that person’s timeline, so an invoice or a screenshot is still there weeks later when somebody else picks the conversation up.
Open Webhook Relay and add an Inbox endpoint. Forward your support or sales address to it, send yourself a test message, and watch the first contact appear. The free plan includes an inbox address and the full contacts workspace.
Add Viably to Slack