One address for every customer record

Every CRM that logs email asks you to remember something: a per-user BCC address, a browser extension, a sidebar you have to open before you write. Viably asks you to remember one address for the whole workspace. Copy it onto a reply you are sending anyway, or add it as a guest on a meeting you are booking anyway, and the record keeps itself. There is nothing to install and nothing to open.

Trigger: via+<handle>@
Lands in: The contact's timeline
Setup: 1 min
Needs: An email inbox on the workspace

Why one address rather than several

A workspace that answers customers from more than one place ends up with more than one address, and then with a decision nobody should have to make while writing an email.

A support inbox, a sales inbox and a contact form are three different front doors, and a growing team will run all three. Give each of them its own logging address and the person answering has to know which one this particular conversation belongs to before they can log it. Get it wrong and nothing warns you, because the message still arrives and still files somewhere. The customer is the only one who sees the mistake.

The shared address removes the question. It is one string per workspace, it looks like [email protected], and it is the same one whatever the conversation is about. Which of your inboxes a thread belongs to is a question Viably answers from the message, because everything it needs to answer it is already on the message.

A workspace that runs more than one brand does not get a second unrelated string either. Each brand’s address is the shared one with the brand’s name on the end, so [email protected] is recognisably the same address as the one above. There is one thing to remember and one rule for extending it, rather than a list of addresses nobody can hold in their head.

Set up in 3 steps

All three are one-time, and the first one you have probably already done.

Check you have somewhere for mail to land. Every workspace is given one when Viably is installed, so this is usually already done. Under Webhook Relay you can add another for each brand you answer as, and each one is reachable at the shared address with its name on the end.
Shorten your handle. Under Powers, General, the workspace handle sits inline in the address. Viably picks one for you from your workspace name; a shorter one is easier to type and easier to say out loud. It is claimed globally, so it is worth taking the one you want early.
Save it as a contact. Anywhere Viably shows you the address there is a Save as a contact button, which downloads a card your mail client can import. Every member should do this once. After it, the address autocompletes as Viably Agent when you start typing a name, and nobody has to remember the address itself.

On Gmail it takes one extra click

Apple Mail, Outlook and both phone platforms open the downloaded card straight into your address book. Google Contacts imports from a file picker instead, so open Google Contacts, choose Import, and pick the card you just downloaded. It is filed under your workspace name as well, so somebody who belongs to two workspaces keeps two distinct entries.

Nothing to install

There is no extension, no OAuth grant and no change to how anyone sends mail. The address is an ordinary recipient, so it works from Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, a phone, and anything else that can put an address in a Cc field.

How it decides who a message is about

The address identifies the workspace. Everything after that is read off the message itself.

It knows your people

Members who linked an account, addresses you verified, and every domain you have claimed. Anyone on that list is you, and is never captured as a contact.

It picks the counterparty

The first recipient outside your workspace, with a To beating a Cc, because the person a message is addressed to is its subject and anyone copied is an observer.

It checks the sender is real

A message claiming to come from one of your own addresses has to pass DMARC. A forged reply written onto a customer's record would be worse than no record.

It finds the conversation

The entry is filed on the thread that customer already has with you, not on whichever inbox the copy happened to arrive at.

The practical effect is that you can copy the address on a reply to a customer while three colleagues are also on the thread, and the message lands on the customer’s record with none of your colleagues turning into contacts. You can also be copied on a stranger’s enquiry and have it file as their enquiry rather than as yours.

The same address works on a calendar invite

Add it as a guest and the meeting appears on the timeline of everyone in the room you already track.

A contact enquires, somebody books a call with them, and in most CRMs those two facts never meet. The record shows a form submission going quiet while the relationship is in fact the healthiest it has been. Adding [email protected] as a guest closes that, and it needs no calendar connection at all: the invitation your calendar sends already carries the time, the title and the guest list.

A meeting lands on every attendee your workspace already tracks, so two people from the same company in one call read that way on both records.
Reschedule it and the entry moves with it. Cancel it and the entry is removed, because the meeting no longer exists on your calendar either.
Anyone who declined is left off, since a meeting on a record is read as evidence they were in the room.

Or connect your calendar instead

Under Powers, Calendar, each member can switch on meeting logging for their own calendar. That covers the calls nobody thought to invite Viably to. It is per person and off until they turn it on, and it only ever records a meeting involving somebody already in your contacts. See Google Calendar.

Where the entry actually lands

This is the part that is hard to notice and does most of the work.

Suppose a lead arrives through your website’s contact form. A week later somebody answers them from Gmail and copies the shared address. The message arrives at one of your inboxes, because that is where mail to your workspace goes, but the conversation does not live there. It lives on the contact form.

Viably files the reply on the form’s conversation, not on the inbox that received the copy. Without that, a record would read as two unrelated fragments: an enquiry with no answer, and an answer with no enquiry. It is also what keeps the Slack card for that enquiry showing the reply underneath it, rather than posting a second card nobody connects to the first.

Which of your addresses answers

A workspace running more than one brand decides this once, on the source the enquiry came from, rather than every time somebody writes back.

When you answer a customer from Viably, either from the reply box on their record or from the Reply button on a Slack card, the message goes out as a real email from one of your own brand addresses. Viably reads the conversation to work out which one. An enquiry that arrived at [email protected] is answered from that address, because it is the one the customer wrote to and the one their mail client will thread your reply against.

Enquiries that arrive any other way carry no address of their own. A contact form on your marketing site, a signup webhook and a WhatsApp handoff all reach Viably without saying which of your brands they belong to. Open that endpoint under Powers, Webhook Relay, and the Reply as field names the brand its enquiries are answered from. The setting lives on the source because a brand is a property of where an enquiry came from, and leaving it to be settled at the moment somebody answers is how a customer ends up reading a reply from a company they have never heard of.

Put together, Viably works through four possibilities in order and sends from the first one that applies. A workspace running a single inbox never meets any of this, because every possibility resolves to the same address.

The inbox you picked in the composer, for the occasional reply you want to send from somewhere other than the usual place.
The address the conversation already runs through, which covers every enquiry that arrived as email.
The Reply as inbox set on the source, for enquiries that arrived by form or by webhook.
Your default brand, which is the one that has claimed no name of its own and answers at the shared address itself. This covers a workspace that has never set any of the above and only ever answers as one brand anyway.

The name customers read

Every brand also has a Sender name beside its address. Fill it in and replies go out as Athlead <[email protected]> rather than as the bare address. It is kept separate from the endpoint’s own name, which teams tend to fill with internal shorthand like ask or help-sectors, and which no customer should ever have to read.

What it will not do

Two limits worth knowing before you rely on it.

It cannot guess the brand for somebody it has never met. A conversation that already exists is answered from the address it runs through, and an enquiry from a source you have mapped is answered from the inbox you mapped it to. A brand-new contact who is copied straight to the shared address belongs to neither case, so the reply goes out from your default brand. Hand out that brand’s own address when the brand has to be right from the very first message.
It cannot see mail you never copy it on. There is no mailbox scanning and no read access to your email. The capability begins and ends with the address being on the message, which is also why nothing of yours is readable by Viably unless you put it there.

Common questions

Does copying the address turn my colleagues into contacts?

No. Viably reads every recipient on the message and works out which of them is outside your workspace, using the members you have linked, the addresses you have verified and the domains you have claimed. Your own people are never captured, and neither are your own Viably addresses.

What if the customer replies from a different address?

Their reply is captured as a new contact, which is correct as far as capture can know, and Viably records that the two are probably the same person by following the thread. It never merges them on its own, because a merge cannot be cleanly undone. You decide from the record.

Can somebody forge my address to write a fake reply onto a customer's record?

Not if your domain publishes a DMARC record. Viably checks the DMARC verdict on any message whose From claims one of your own addresses, and refuses it outright when the check fails. A domain that publishes no DMARC has no evidence either way, which is the case for publishing one.

I run two brands. Which address does my reply go out from?

The one that conversation already runs through, so a customer who wrote to your support address is answered from your support address. For enquiries that arrive by form or webhook and carry no address of their own, you set a Reply as inbox on that endpoint under Powers, Webhook Relay, and every enquiry from that source is answered from it. You can also override the choice for a single reply in the composer.

Can customers see a company name rather than the raw address?

Yes. Each inbox endpoint has a Sender name field, and replies go out as that name beside the address. It is separate from the endpoint's own name, which is an internal label for your team, so the shorthand you use inside Viably never reaches a customer.

Do I need to connect my Google Calendar for meetings to appear?

Not for invites. Adding the address as a guest is enough, because the invitation itself carries the times and the guest list. Connecting your calendar is the other route, and it covers meetings nobody thought to invite Viably to.

Will a meeting create a contact I do not have yet?

Never. A meeting only attaches to somebody already in your contacts. An entry involving nobody you track is read and discarded without a trace, which is what makes reading a calendar defensible in the first place.

What happens if I send to the address by mistake with nobody else on it?

Nothing is recorded. With no counterparty on the message there is nobody to file it against, so it is logged as internal in your event log and goes no further.

Copy your address and use it once

It is on your dashboard home, in the panel beside your contacts, and under every contact record.

Add Viably to your workspace, create an inbox, and copy the address onto the next customer email you send. The record is waiting for you when you get back.

Add Viably to Slack

See it in actionOne address