Rules

Rules automatically organize and assign incoming conversations based on criteria you define. They’re perfect for routing specific types of emails to the right people, applying labels, or performing other actions automatically.

How Rules Work

Rules are “if-then” statements that run automatically on every incoming message:

IF [condition is met] THEN [perform this action]

For example:

IF the email is from support@bigclient.com THEN assign it to Sarah and add the “Priority” label

Each rule has one condition and one or more actions. All active rules are checked against every incoming message, and every rule that matches will run — there’s no “first match wins” behaviour.

Creating Rules

Go to Settings → Rules and click Create a new rule.

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

Conditions

Choose what to match on:

Condition Matches against
From address The sender’s email address
To address The recipient address
CC/BCC address The CC or BCC addresses
Any address All of the above
Forwarding address The specific forwarding address the email was sent to
Subject contains The email subject line
Body contains The email body text
Anywhere Subject, body, and all addresses

Matching is case-insensitive and uses contains logic — if your criteria value appears anywhere in the field, the rule matches. For example, a rule matching “invoice” in the subject will match “Your Invoice #1234”, “INVOICE attached”, and “Re: invoice question”.

Rules can only match a single condition, but you can have multiple rules matching each message that arrives. Rule conditions are very simple; Jelly doesn’t currently support matching multiple conditions with “AND” or “OR” joining clauses. We may add this in the future.

Actions

You can combine multiple actions on a single rule:

  • Add a label — Applies a label to the conversation

If anyone in your team is auto-following that label, they’ll automatically be subscribed to the conversation too.

  • Assign to a person — Assigns the conversation to a specific team member
  • Skip the inbox and archive — Archives the conversation immediately

This is useful for messages you want to be able to find, but that don’t require any action — receipts, confirmations, automated notifications, and things like that.

  • Mark as spam — Marks the conversation as spam, with an optional sub-action to also block the sender

When blocking a sender, contacts marked as “never spam” will not be blocked.

Applying Rules Retroactively

When you create a new rule, you can tick the option to apply it to existing conversations. This runs the rule against all your existing messages in the background, which is useful if you’re setting up rules after you’ve already received some mail.

Examples

Here are some common rule setups:

Route billing emails to the right person:

  • Condition: To address contains billing@
  • Actions: Add “Billing” label, Assign to Alex

Auto-archive receipts:

  • Condition: From address contains noreply@
  • Actions: Skip the inbox and archive

Flag VIP customers:

  • Condition: From address contains @bigclient.com
  • Actions: Add “VIP” label

Block persistent spam:

  • Condition: From address contains spammer@example.com
  • Actions: Mark as spam, Block sender

Route by forwarding address:

  • Condition: Forwarding address is support@yourteam.sendtojelly.com
  • Actions: Add “Support” label

Plus-tagged addresses are a powerful way to use forwarding address rules. Your forwarding address accepts emails with a +tag appended to the local part — for example, hello+billing@yourteam.sendtojelly.com will be delivered to the same inbox as hello@yourteam.sendtojelly.com. You can give different plus-tagged addresses to different services, then use forwarding address rules to automatically label or route conversations based on which tagged address received the email.