[Customer Beta] Mirror in inbox rule action

⚠️ This feature is in beta. This article may require final changes before the feature is available to all customers.

The Mirror in inbox rule action allows you to make conversations in individual inboxes visible in shared inboxes. The conversation is accessible in both inboxes at the same time, without moving the conversation out of the individual inbox. This is helpful for teams with workflows where customers directly email a specific teammate (like an account manager), but conversations also need to be visible to the entire team via a shared inbox.

Using the shared inbox, teams can then:

• Respond to customers for a teammate when they are out of office

• Ensure timely resolutions by leveraging time goal rules

• Organize requests using ticketing or tagging

You must be a company admin to create company rules. This article assumes you know how to create Smart Rules and dynamic variables.

In a company rule, create a new dynamic variable called Inbox owner. This dynamic variable will extract the teammate who originally received an inbound message in their individual inbox.

Under the “Extract conversation property” section, select Inbox owner, then click Save. Your finished variable will look like the following:

Now that you have the dynamic variable you need, you can build out the base rule. 

When:

• Inbound message is received

If:

• Inbox belongs to [teammate(s) or teammate group(s)]

Then: 

• Mirror in [shared inbox]

• Assign to teammate [Inbox owner]

In this example rule, we want to mirror conversations received by teammates in the Customer Success Managers teammate group. The conversations from their individual inboxes will be mirrored in the Customer Success shared inbox, then assigned to the teammate who received the original message.

Add a rule condition to tell the rule to narrow down which conversations to mirror in a shared inbox.

If you have a list of domains you’d like to exclude from your mirror in inbox rule, add the rule condition From field doesn’t contain [list domains]. This is useful when you need to exclude emails from:

• Your internal domain

• HR-related email addresses

• Payroll vendor domains

⚠️ Important to know:

• This list of domains needs to be manually updated when new vendors are adopted by your team.

• If your domains are not identified correctly, high-risk emails will be accessible in your shared inbox.

• This rule cannot differentiate between internal emails that may need to be moved to a shared inbox.

If you have a list of domains you’d like to include in your mirror in inbox rule, add the rule condition From field contains [list domains]. This is useful when you need to include emails from specific clients or customers.

⚠️ Important to know: This list of domains must be manually updated when there are changes to your client list.

If you’ve imported account data into Front, you can use an account custom field with the condition Account custom field contains. This is useful if you have a field like “Is client?” to identify which customers should be included in your rule.

⚠️ Important to know: You must maintain accurate account records in Front for this rule to work as expected.

Add any additional triggers, conditions, or actions you’d like to include in your rule, then click Save to finish.

Moving forward, any new messages received in your teammates’ individual inboxes will be mirrored in your shared inbox.

The mirror action is more useful when you just want to grant visibility to an email, but still plan to take ownership of the conversation if you directly received it. The move action is more useful when you want true team ownership, and you care less about who received a message first.

You can achieve similar results with both mirror and move actions, but the mirror action is more appropriate when you just want to give visibility over your emails, but you don't plan to enhance the workflow or redistribute the load.

If your conversation is merged and appears in multiple individual inboxes and shared inboxes, archiving/trashing the conversation in your individual inbox does not affect the copies mirrored in the shared inboxes or another teammate’s individual inboxes. 

This feature is available on the latest Enterprise plan. Some legacy plans may have access.