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Emailing a customer

Email a customer from your business address, and have their replies — and mail they send you — filed under them automatically.

Email goes out under your company's name from your Lupa inbound address, and replies come back to the same address. Nobody's personal mailbox is involved.

Start a new email thread

  1. Choose Comms in the left rail and open the customer.
  2. Choose the Email tab.
  3. Choose Compose new thread. The Compose new email thread form opens, with the customer's address shown beside To:.
  4. Fill in Subject and the message body.
  5. Choose Send.

Lupa confirms with "Message sent." and the new thread appears in the customer's Email threads list. Every Compose new thread starts a separate thread.

  • If you leave Subject blank, the email still goes, under the subject "Lupa message for" followed by the customer's name, and Lupa tells you so.
  • If the body is empty, nothing is sent and Lupa says "Cannot send an empty message."

To close the form without sending, choose the × in its corner.

Pick up a draft

What you type in Compose new thread is saved as you go — Lupa shows "Draft saved." — and kept for seven days. Drafts are yours alone: other people on your team do not see them.

You keep one draft per customer. When you return to a customer's Email tab with an unsent draft, a band under the tabs reads You have an unsent draft for this client.

  • Choose Continue draft to reopen it in the composer.
  • Choose Discard to delete it. Lupa confirms with "Draft discarded."

A draft is offered, never reopened on its own, so the composer always starts blank until you choose. Inside an open draft, Discard draft deletes it.

Read and reply to an email thread

  1. Open the customer under Comms and choose Email.
  2. Choose a thread from Email threads. If the customer has only one, it opens on its own.
  3. Read the thread. The oldest message is at the top, and the view scrolls to the latest.
  4. To reply, type into Type a message... at the bottom and choose Send.

Each message shows who sent it — the customer's name or address, or You — whether it was received or sent, the time, and the subject. Earlier quoted text in a message is folded away behind … show full message; choose it to expand, and Hide full message to fold it again.

A reply goes back to the customer on the same thread, so it stays together in their mail program as well as in Lupa.

If an email you sent could not be delivered, it carries a bounced badge. Check the customer's email address on their file.

If the notice Sending disabled — Outbound email isn't configured appears above the reply box, Lupa cannot send email for your company right now. Contact Lupa support — see Getting help from Lupa.

Get customer email threaded automatically

Your company has its own inbound email address. Mail sent to it is filed without anybody sorting it:

  • A reply to an email Lupa sent goes back onto the thread it answers — even when it comes from a different address, such as a spouse or a work account.
  • New mail from an address on file — one that matches a customer's email address — starts a new thread on that customer.
  • Anything else waits in Needs Triage for you to file. See Mail from someone you don't recognise.

To find your inbound address:

  1. Choose Settings in the left rail, then the Comms status tab.
  2. Under Forwarding addresses, choose Copy.

The same address appears in How does this work? at the foot of the Comms panel, and at the top of the customer list before your first conversation.

To bring in mail your customers already send to your existing business address, set up a forwarding rule on that mailbox that redirects messages to your inbound address. A redirect keeps the customer's own address as the sender, so Lupa files each message under the right customer.

Forwarding by hand works differently. When you choose Forward in your own mail program, your address becomes the sender. Lupa then sees the mail as coming from you, not the customer, so it lands in Needs Triage for you to attach. That works, but it is a manual step every time.

Mail sent from Lupa's own inbound addresses is discarded, so that a forwarding loop cannot fill your inbox.

Only the text of an inbound email is kept. Attachments are not stored and do not appear anywhere in Lupa; if a customer says they sent a document, look for it in the mailbox it was sent to.

If a customer wrote to the wrong address

A customer's email that reached you after being sent to an address that isn't yours carries a banner: This message was misaddressed (sent to …). Please ask your client to use … followed by your inbound address. The message itself is filed normally. Ask the customer to use the address shown from now on.