👑🧪 Mailboxes

Mailboxes let you control the visibility of conversations so that only a subset of your team can see them. They’re useful when certain kinds of messages shouldn’t be visible to everyone — financial information, sensitive client work, HR matters, and so on.

This page describes a feature that hasn’t launched yet. Details may change before release.

This feature is only available on the Royal Jelly plan

How Mailboxes Work

Every team starts with a single default mailbox (called “General”, though you can rename it). All conversations live in the default mailbox, and all team members can see them — this is how Jelly works without mailboxes.

When you create additional mailboxes, you can restrict who sees what:

  • Each conversation belongs to exactly one mailbox
  • Team members only see conversations in mailboxes they belong to
  • New conversations arrive in the default mailbox unless a rule moves them elsewhere

Your Inbox always shows conversations from all the mailboxes you have access to, so you don’t miss anything. But teammates who aren’t members of a particular mailbox won’t see its conversations at all — they’re completely hidden from their view.

The default mailbox is special. It’s created automatically with your team and can’t be deleted. New team members are automatically added to it when they join.

Creating Mailboxes

Go to Settings → Mailboxes and click Create new mailbox. Give it a name, and you’re done.

Only admins and team owners can create, edit, and delete mailboxes.

You’ll be automatically added as a member of any mailbox you create. Other team members won’t have access until you add them.

Managing Members

Mailbox membership controls who can see the conversations inside. To manage members:

  1. Go to Settings → Mailboxes
  2. Click on a mailbox name to see its members
  3. Click Add or Remove next to each team member’s name

A team member can belong to as many mailboxes as you like. If someone belongs to multiple mailboxes, they’ll see conversations from all of them in their inbox.

New team members are automatically added to the default mailbox when they join, but you can remove them if they don’t need access to it.

What Non-Members Can’t See

Mailbox access is a hard boundary. If a team member isn’t a member of a mailbox, conversations in that mailbox are invisible to them — everywhere, not just in the inbox. Specifically, non-members:

  • Can’t see the conversations in their Inbox — they simply don’t appear
  • Can’t find them via search — search results only include conversations from mailboxes you belong to
  • Won’t receive notifications — even if they were previously subscribed to or assigned a conversation, moving it to a mailbox they don’t belong to removes it from their view
  • Won’t see them in activity feeds — activity from conversations in other mailboxes doesn’t appear in their feed

This makes mailboxes suitable for genuinely sensitive information. If a conversation is in a mailbox someone doesn’t have access to, there’s no way for them to stumble across it.

Filtering Your Inbox by Mailbox

By default, your Inbox shows conversations from all your mailboxes together. When you belong to more than one mailbox, a mailbox filter appears in the inbox location menu. Click it to view just one mailbox at a time, so you can focus on a specific area.

Your inbox works the same way whether you’re viewing everything or a single mailbox — conversations are organized into Brand New, Yours, Unclaimed, and Not Yours.

Moving Conversations Between Mailboxes

You can move a conversation to a different mailbox at any time:

  1. Open the conversation
  2. Click the mailbox icon in the conversation header
  3. Choose the destination mailbox from the dropdown

The move is logged in the conversation’s activity feed so your team can see where a conversation came from.

You can only move conversations to mailboxes you belong to. The dropdown only shows your other mailboxes.

Automatic Organization with Rules

Mailboxes are most powerful when combined with rules. Instead of manually moving conversations, you can set up rules that automatically route incoming messages to the right mailbox.

For example:

Route support emails to a Support mailbox:

  • Condition: To address contains support@
  • Actions: Move to “Support” mailbox

Separate client work by account:

  • Condition: From address contains @bigclient.com
  • Actions: Move to “Big Client” mailbox, Add “VIP” label

Organize by forwarding address:

  • Condition: Forwarding address is sales@yourteam.sendtojelly.com
  • Actions: Move to “Sales” mailbox

To add a mailbox action to a rule, go to Settings → Rules, create or edit a rule, and check the Move it to mailbox option, then choose the destination.

You can combine the mailbox action with other rule actions — like adding a label, assigning to a person, or archiving — all in the same rule.

Editing and Deleting Mailboxes

From Settings → Mailboxes, click the ⋯ menu next to any mailbox to edit its name or delete it.

When you delete a mailbox, its conversations are moved to the default mailbox first. You can’t delete a mailbox that still contains conversations — they need to be moved first.

The default mailbox can’t be deleted.

Tips

  • Start simple — You don’t need to create lots of mailboxes upfront. Start with one or two to separate your most distinct areas, and add more as the need arises
  • Use rules for automation — Manually moving conversations works fine at low volume, but rules make mailboxes much more useful at scale
  • Think about team structure — Mailboxes work well when different subsets of your team handle different types of conversations. If everyone handles everything, you might not need mailboxes at all
  • Combine with labels — Mailboxes control visibility (each conversation lives in exactly one mailbox), while labels can cross-cut across mailboxes. Use mailboxes for access control and labels for categorization