Email: connect an account and switch senders

Communication ▸ Email opens on Sending, and that tab answers the question most people arrive with: which address does my mail go out as, and how do I change it? Every address you may send from sits in one list - the addresses you have connected yourself and the ones your workspace shares - the address currently in use is marked, and moving to another one is a single click. Adding an address and proving it is yours happens on that same tab. There are four tabs in all: Sending, Mail, Rules, and Health for owners and admins.

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   1. Add the address

   Open Communication ▸ Email, stay on the Sending tab and click Add an address. Type the address, plus a display name if you want one (that is the name an inbox shows beside it). It saves straight away, but it cannot send anything yet.

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   2. Prove the address is yours

   There are three ways and no others. Sign in with Google and Google vouches for the address, along with every alias it already accepts, so nothing more is needed. For Zoho, Fastmail or a mailbox your own web host sells you, type the address and WorkBOS looks up its mail server for you; a real sign-in to that server, and a message that really sends, is the proof. Otherwise WorkBOS emails a one-time link to the address and somebody who can read that inbox opens it.

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   3. Start sending as it

   A confirmed address appears in the list on the Sending tab. Press "Use this" beside any address there and your mail goes out as that one from that moment on. An address that is not confirmed yet says so, with a button that takes you back to finish it.

You can hold more than one address and move between them freely. Every confirmed address you may send from is on the Sending tab together, the way accounts sit side by side in a mail app: the one in use carries an "In use" label, and every other one carries a button that makes it the one in use. There is nothing else to set. Which address is in use is worked out from where your mail actually goes rather than kept as a separate setting, so the list cannot say one thing while your mail does another. An address your workspace shares is marked "Shared": switching to that one changes it for the whole workspace, and switching to one of your own changes it for you alone. WorkBOS’s own addresses, such as billing@workbos.com, are deliberately left out of your list, because they belong to WorkBOS rather than to your workspace.

Most workspaces send everything from one address, and then the Sending tab is the whole story. If a particular kind of mail genuinely does leave from somewhere else - billing from one address and everything else from another, say - a short "Some mail goes out differently" list appears underneath naming only those. The long list of message types that used to fill this screen has gone: a line appears when there is really something to see, and otherwise it does not.

Why can I not connect my Gmail? Almost always because your workspace owner has not allowed it yet, rather than because anything is broken. Connecting an address of your own, whether that is a Gmail address, a Google Workspace address or a mailbox from your own web host, is a switch the owner controls and it starts off. The note below says exactly which switch it is and who can change it.

Inbox (beta): what this tab is for. Open Communication ▸ Email ▸ Mail ▸ Inbox (beta). The idea is that your email stays exactly where it is, with Gmail or Outlook, and WorkBOS keeps only a tidy index of what came in and went out so every conversation can sit against the right client or lead. The one mailbox you can connect here today is the demo one. It connects instantly and fills the tab with example conversations built from your own clients and leads (or generic examples, if none of your contacts have an email address on file), so you can see exactly how it would work. The "Gmail inbox" and "Outlook inbox" buttons beside it are greyed out on purpose, and the note below says why. Up to three mailboxes per person.

• What is stored for each message: who it was from, who it was to, the subject line, the date and time, and a short preview of up to 500 characters. That is the lot: the app calls this synced metadata: the details around a message, never the message itself.
• What is never stored: the body of your messages, any attachment, and your password. WorkBOS never asks for or holds your email password: you approve the connection by signing in with Google or Microsoft, that approval is kept outside the app, and you can withdraw it whenever you like.
• Matched for you: each conversation is linked automatically to the client or lead whose email address is on it, so it turns up on the right record with no filing, forwarding or BCC. Addresses that are not in your CRM simply stay unlinked.
• Sending from this tab: use Compose (Inbox or Sent) to write mail from WorkBOS with your connected account as the sender. On the demo inbox the message is recorded and fully trackable but nothing actually leaves WorkBOS. To send mail that really arrives, use a sending address from the Sending tab, which is a different thing and works today.

Health (admins): measure whether your mail lands. The Health tab scores each domain out of 100 from what can be proven: DNS verification, your published DMARC policy, and the last 30 days of DMARC aggregate reports, with plain-language fixes ranked next to the score. Mailbox providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo…) email those aggregate reports daily to the rua address on your domain: import the XML attachments here and the score starts reflecting reality. A live blocklist card checks Spamhaus DBL and SURBL from your own browser; it is informational and never stored.

Sent & tracking: know what happened to important mail. Every message composed in WorkBOS lands on the Sent tab with a live status pill: Sent, Opened or Clicked. Leave “Track opens & clicks” ticked when composing and WorkBOS adds an invisible open pixel and click-counts the links in your message (the first 20). Click a sent message for its timeline. When it was opened, how many times, and which links were clicked. The list refreshes itself every 30 seconds while you watch it.

• Per-message control: untick tracking in the compose window to send with nothing attached, or open a sent message and untick “Keep tracking this message” to stop counting from that moment.
• Recipient privacy by design: tracking URLs carry a random token only. No email address, no name, no workspace identifier. Nobody can work out who a message went to (or that it exists) from the tracking link.
• Fair-use caps: each account can send 200 tracked messages a day and each workspace 2,000; past the cap sending is blocked with a clear message rather than silently queued.

Inbox rules: automate the filing. Open Communication ▸ Email ▸ Rules and describe what to watch for (sender, sender domain, subject, preview text, direction) and what should happen: add a label, create a CRM lead if the message isn’t already linked, create a task for you, or send you a notification. Rules run on the server when mail syncs in, so every device sees the same result, and the built-in dry-run tester shows what a rule would have matched in your recent mail before it ever acts. Rules apply to your own inboxes only, act at most once per message, can never send mail, and can never trigger one another.

Share your inbox: read-only, on your terms. From the Inbox tab, Share lets you give chosen teammates read access to your threads: useful for a shared support address or holiday cover. Sharing is yours alone to give and take back: workspace owners and admins cannot grant themselves access to your inbox, a shared teammate never sees your Sent tracking and cannot send as you, and every grant and revoke is audited. Inboxes shared with you appear in the account picker marked “shared”.

Disconnect and Remove are two different buttons and they mean two different things. Both sit on the connected mailbox on Communication ▸ Email ▸ Mail. Disconnect is the pause: it stops the mailbox being used and keeps the setup, so reconnecting later is one click. Remove is the goodbye: it deletes the connection and the saved sign-in behind it, and it retires any address that was sending through that connection so your sending list is not left pointing at something that no longer exists. If you are not sure which you want, disconnect. It is the one you can undo.

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   Disconnect whenever you want

   Open Communication ▸ Email ▸ Mail ▸ Inbox (beta), click Disconnect on your connected mailbox and confirm. Syncing stops there and then and the stored permission to reach your mailbox is thrown away, so WorkBOS cannot read anything further from it. The mailbox stays on the screen, switched off, ready to be connected again.

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   Or disconnect and erase what was synced

   On that same confirmation tick “Also delete synced metadata” before confirming, and every stored detail for the mailbox (senders, recipients, subjects, dates and previews) is deleted permanently. Leave it unticked and that history stays on your clients and leads; disconnecting on its own never deletes it. Erased history cannot be recovered.

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   Or remove it for good

   Click Remove instead, and confirm. This deletes the connection and the sign-in WorkBOS had saved for it, so there is nothing left to reconnect: setting it up again means setting it up from scratch. Any address that was sending through that connection is retired at the same time, which means it stops being usable as a sender and stops appearing as a live choice on the Sending tab. It is not erased: mail you have already sent keeps its record of who it came from, so your history stays readable. The confirmation tells you how many addresses were retired. Mail already sent is not affected in any way.

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   Who can disconnect and who can remove

   You can always disconnect or remove a mailbox you connected yourself. A workspace owner or admin can also do either one on somebody else’s behalf, which is what you want when a person leaves, and they still never see a word of that mailbox’s contents. Nobody else can. Every removal is written to the audit trail with who did it, which address it was and how many addresses were retired, so the question "who got rid of that mailbox" always has an answer.