👑 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 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:

  • A conversation can belong to one or more mailboxes
  • A team member can see a conversation if they’re a member of any of its mailboxes
  • New conversations arrive in the default mailbox unless a rule routes them elsewhere

Letting a conversation belong to several mailboxes is useful when more than one group of people legitimately need to see it. For example, a customer email about a billing question might live in both Support and Finance so members of either team can pick it up — without making it visible to people in neither.

Your Inbox always shows conversations from all the mailboxes you have access to, so you don’t miss anything. Teammates who aren’t members of any of a conversation’s mailboxes won’t see it at all — it’s 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, unless you provide a specific set of mailboxes as part of their invitation.

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.

Removing a member from a mailbox also strips any conversation assignments that depend on it. If they were assigned to a conversation in that mailbox and no longer have access via any of the conversation’s other mailboxes, those assignments are automatically removed at the same time.

By default, 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 any of a conversation’s mailboxes, that conversation is invisible to them — everywhere, not just in the inbox. Specifically, non-members:

  • Won’t be assignable — people can only claim or be assigned to conversations in mailboxes they have access to
  • Can’t see the conversation in their Inbox — it simply doesn’t appear
  • Can’t find it 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, removing the only mailbox they had access to takes the conversation out of their view
  • Won’t see it in activity feeds — activity from inaccessible conversations doesn’t appear in their feed

This makes mailboxes suitable for genuinely sensitive information. If a conversation is only in mailboxes 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.

Adding, Moving, and Removing Conversations

Open the Mailboxes menu on a conversation — either from its header or from the bulk action bar when you’ve selected several at once — to change which mailboxes it belongs to.

The menu lists every mailbox you have access to, one row each. Two click targets per row:

  • The checkbox on the left toggles whether this conversation belongs to this mailbox.
    • Unchecked — clicking adds the conversation to this mailbox.
    • Checked — clicking removes the conversation from this mailbox. A conversation must always be in at least one mailbox, so the checkbox is disabled when this is the only one.
  • The mailbox name on the right is the Move action. Clicking it makes that mailbox the conversation’s only mailbox — the conversation is added to it (if it wasn’t already there) and removed from every other mailbox it was in. Reach for Move when the conversation belongs to one team from now on; reach for the checkbox when it should be visible from more than one place.

In the bulk menu — when you’ve selected multiple conversations — the checkbox shows a tri-state for the selection as a whole:

  • Empty — none of the selected conversations are in this mailbox. Clicking it adds all of them.
  • Half-checked (with a small caption like 1/3) — some are in. Clicking it adds the rest, so they’re all in.
  • Checked (with all) — every selected conversation is already in this mailbox. Clicking it removes them all.

Clicking the mailbox name in the bulk menu always moves every selected conversation to that mailbox, regardless of how many were already in it.

If any of these actions would leave an assignee without access to a conversation — i.e. they’re not a member of any of the mailboxes the conversation will be in afterwards — Jelly asks for confirmation before going ahead, and then unassigns them. The action is logged in the conversation’s activity feed.

Automatic Organization with Rules

Mailboxes are most powerful when combined with rules. Instead of manually adjusting conversations, you can set up rules that automatically route incoming messages.

To add a mailbox action to a rule, go to Settings → Rules, create or edit a rule, and check Add it to mailbox — then choose the destination. By default, the rule adds the conversation to that mailbox without taking it out of the default General mailbox, so members of both can see it.

If you want the rule to behave like a true move — keeping the conversation out of the default mailbox so only members of the target see it — also tick Also remove it from the default mailbox. This is the right setting for most “this should only be visible to one team” rules.

Two rules with the Also remove from default option set work together cleanly: a message that matches both rules ends up in both target mailboxes, with the default removed once. There’s no last-write-wins conflict any more.

For example:

Make support emails visible to the Support team and out of General:

  • Condition: To address contains support@
  • Actions: Add to “Support” mailbox, Also remove from default mailbox

Surface VIP customers in a VIP mailbox without hiding them from General:

  • Condition: From address contains @bigclient.com
  • Actions: Add to “VIP” mailbox (additive — leave Also remove from default off), Add “VIP” label

Organize by forwarding address:

  • Condition: Forwarding address is sales@yourteam.sendtojelly.com
  • Actions: Add to “Sales” mailbox, Also remove from default mailbox

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, every conversation that was in it has the mailbox removed. If a conversation was only in the deleted mailbox, it’s moved into the default mailbox so it doesn’t disappear.

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 adjusting 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
  • Move vs Add — Reach for Move when a conversation belongs to one team and you don’t want it cluttering everyone else’s inbox. Reach for Add when more than one team has a legitimate stake in it
  • Combine with labels — Mailboxes control visibility, while labels are about categorisation. A conversation can be in any combination of mailboxes and have any combination of labels — pick whichever cross-cuts make sense for your team