Email in a shared inbox: sending from your own Gmail or Zoho address, getting replies back in the thread, and staying out of spam

Why your own mailbox

There are two ways for a tool to send your email. One sends from a domain the tool controls, with a Reply-To pointing somewhere else — and customers who press Reply sometimes write into nowhere. The other sends from your own mailbox, through Google's or Zoho's own servers, as you. The second has your address, your reputation, your sent folder and a reply path that cannot break, because the address that sent the message is the one that receives the answer. Linkubit does only the second.

Which mailboxes

Connecting Gmail

1. In Settings › Email, choose Gmail and sign in with the address you want to send from. Linkubit asks only for permission to send — not to read your mail.
2. Add the inbound address shown on the card as a forwarding address in Gmail's settings, and create a filter that forwards mail from customers (or everything) to it.
3. Gmail sends a confirmation to that address. It appears on the settings card; open the link or enter the code in Gmail, and the rule is active.
4. Send yourself a test, reply to it, and watch the reply arrive in the thread.

Connecting Zoho Mail

1. In Settings › Email, choose Zoho and sign in. Approve the permissions on Zoho's screen.
2. That is all. New mail in the mailbox's Inbox is read automatically and filed against the right customer. Only recent mail is read on the first check — not years of history turned into contacts.
3. If the connection ever stops working — a password change, a revoked grant — the card says so and offers a Reconnect button, rather than claiming replies are arriving.

Sending limits, and why campaigns get only part

Google and Zoho cap how much one mailbox may send a day. A campaign that used the whole allowance at 10am would leave nothing for replying to customers that afternoon — the worst failure available, because it is silent. So campaigns may use only a share of each mailbox's daily limit, and the rest is held for conversations. A newly connected mailbox also starts slowly and ramps up over its first weeks, so a first campaign cannot get a fresh Workspace account flagged. A campaign member held back by the limit shows as "waiting on the mailbox", not as failed.

What happens to the mail that isn't from a person

• Bounces, mailing lists and no-reply senders are dropped before they become contacts — nobody should be billed for answering a newsletter.
• Out-of-office and auto-replies are written into the thread so a person can see them, and never answered, because an assistant answering an auto-responder is a loop that only stops when somebody notices the bill.
• A thread that suddenly gets dozens of messages in an hour stops getting automatic replies — the safety net for a responder that does not announce itself.

Staying out of spam

• Send campaigns only to people who opted in, with the source and the time recorded.
• Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe — as a header on Gmail, as a link in the body on Zoho — and it works at once.
• Watch the complaint rate. Google's Postmaster Tools reports it for your domain; above 0.1% is a warning, above 0.3% is a problem.
• Keep a campaign's tone close to a person's: plain text reads better than a poster, and your own layout — logo, colours, footer — is applied to every email the workspace sends.