01
How does my email actually reach the agent?
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You forward it. We give you an address of your own, something like
[email protected], and you set a rule in whatever you already read your mail in to send a copy of everything, or of one folder, to that address. That is the whole connection. We are never given your password, we never sign in to your mailbox, and we cannot see anything you have not forwarded. Your own inbox carries on exactly as it did: the forward is a copy, so every message still lands with you.
02
What does the agent do with one?
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It reads it and does one of four things. If it can answer, it answers. If it is nearly able to answer but the person left something out, it asks for that one detail rather than guessing. If your agent has a diary it can book into, it books and confirms the day, the weekday and the time. And if it is not something a machine should be answering, it does not answer it: the message is handed to you with a note saying why, and the enquiry is written into your leads so it does not live only in a mailbox.
03
What will it never answer?
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Anything about money, anything that reads as a complaint, anything legal, and anything else your agent is told to leave to a person. Those are handed to you unanswered, with the reason, and you get told about them the way you get told about a call. The rule is deliberately blunt: the cost of an agent staying quiet is a message you answer yourself, and the cost of it having a go is a customer holding a reply nobody meant to send.
04
Does it reply to newsletters and invoices?
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No, and the guards that stop it are in the code rather than in an instruction it is asked to follow. Mailing lists, automatic replies, bounces, out-of-office notices, system notifications and anything that came from a no-reply address are set aside before the agent is asked anything at all. You can still see every one of them in your dashboard with the reason it was set aside, so you can tell the difference between mail that was ignored on purpose and mail that went missing.
05
Will the reply look like it came from us?
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Once your domain is verified, yes: it goes out from your own address, with your name on it, and it lands in the reply your customer already started rather than as a new message. Before that it comes from the address we minted for you, with your business name on the From line and replies routed straight back to your real inbox, so a customer who hits reply still reaches you. Nothing about it is hidden, and nothing pretends to be an address you do not own.
06
What is involved in verifying our domain?
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Three records at whoever holds your domain name, all of them CNAMEs. We generate them for you and show them with a copy button each; you or whoever looks after your website pastes them in. Then we check them, and if one is missing or has been pasted with a typo we tell you which one and what it should say rather than making you guess. It is usually ten minutes of somebody's afternoon, and a domain that is not verified does not stop the agent working.
07
Does it thread properly, or does the customer get a new email?
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It threads. The reply carries the references the customer's own mail programme uses to tie a conversation together, so it appears underneath their original message rather than as a fresh one. That matters more than it sounds: a reply that opens a new thread reads as a form letter, and a reply that lands in the conversation reads as somebody having got back to them.
08
How does it know anything about our business?
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It is the same agent that answers your phone, so it already knows your services, your hours, your prices if you have given it any, and whatever else you have put on its knowledge. There is nothing separate to write and nothing extra to keep up to date. Change something once and it changes on the phone and in the inbox together.
09
Can I have it capture and hand over everything, without replying?
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Yes. There is a setting that turns replying off entirely: every message is still read, still filed against a conversation, still written into your leads and still passed to you, and nothing goes out. Plenty of businesses start there for a fortnight, read what the agent would have said, and turn replying on once they are comfortable. It is a switch, not a rebuild.
10
What does it cost?
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Nothing extra while it is in early access. Email answering is part of what your agent does rather than an add-on with its own bill, and nothing about it is charged for today. If that ever changes we will agree it with you first, in writing, before a cent moves.
11
Where is our mail handled, and how long do you keep it?
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The same way calls are. A New Zealand business is handled in New Zealand data centres and an Australian business in Australia, encrypted at rest. We keep the message, what the agent understood it to be, and the reply that went out, because that is the record you look at when you want to know what a customer was told. Attachments are stored privately and are never fed to the agent.
