Rules

A rule reads as one sentence: when a message arrives, if it matches these conditions, then do these things. You can read one out loud and know what it does, which is not true of most workflow builders.

Settings → Rules. Owners and admins write them; everyone can read them. Unlimited rules on every plan.

Where a rule applies

Applies to is the first choice in a new rule: every shared inbox, or one of them. A rule for support@ does not fire on mail to sales@. Personal inboxes never run rules.

Conditions

Match on From, To, Any recipient (To or Cc), Subject or Body, with contains, doesn’t contain, equals, starts with or ends with. Two more are yes-or-no: Has attachments and Is unassigned. Matching ignores case.

Multiple conditions must all match. Leave the conditions empty to match everything that arrives, which is the shape of a “tag everything in this inbox” rule.

Actions

• Assign to teammate: a specific person.
• Assign round-robin: cycle through the members of the inbox the mail arrived in, skipping anyone marked busy. If everyone is busy nothing is assigned and the conversation waits in the unassigned queue.
• Add tag: a workspace tag. Private tags belong to one person and a rule cannot apply them.
• Archive: done on arrival. For receipts and notifications you want on record but never in the queue.
• Snooze (hours): park it and bring it back later.
• Mark as spam and Move to trash.
• Notify teammates: the people you pick get a notification naming the rule and the subject.

A rule can do several of these at once.

Order and editing

Rules run top to bottom, in the order they were created, and each one sees what the rules above it did: once a rule assigns someone, a later “is unassigned” condition no longer matches. There is no drag to reorder; if the order matters, create the rules in that order.

A rule cannot be edited after it is created. Switch it off with the toggle on its row, delete it, or delete and recreate it with the change. The row shows how many times it has run.

Write them late

The temptation is to set up rules before you have used the inbox. Resist it. Work the queue for a week, notice what you do by reflex to the same kind of mail every time, and automate exactly that. Rules written from imagination are rules you spend a month untangling.

Rules run on arrival

They apply to new inbound mail as it syncs, not retroactively to what is already in the inbox, and not to mail you send. If you want an existing backlog tagged, use search and a bulk action.

Automated mail is skipped: messages that declare themselves auto-generated, or that arrive as bulk or list mail, never trigger a rule. A rule written for a newsletter will not fire, and that is deliberate.