How email and chat work in Filmo
Your email, client chats and team chat are three separate places in Filmo: what each one is for, who sees what, and how Filmo sends email.
A rental business talks all day: the client emails to ask for a quote, writes again from the portal to add chairs, a visitor asks a question on your website, and the warehouse needs to tell the office that a tent came back torn. Filmo keeps those conversations next to the work they're about, so you don't have to jump between your email, a messaging app and Filmo.
Three places, not one inbox
There's no single inbox in Filmo. Email and chat are separate places, with different rules about who sees what. An email never appears in a chat, and a chat message never appears in your email.
| Where | What it's for | Who sees it | What it needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| «Emails» | Your own email: read, organize, reply and send, with NEO's help | Only you. Nobody else sees your mailbox | The «Email and calendar linking» add-on and your own connected mailbox |
| «Communication» → «Customer portal» | Messages from clients in the portal, visitors on your website and, on Campus accounts, app users | Everyone on the team | Nothing extra |
| «Communication» → «Internal Chat» | Channels and direct messages between your team | The members of each conversation | Nothing extra |
Think of «Emails» as your personal desk and the client chats as the shop counter: whoever is free answers. For the Landmark Venues wedding, the coordinator's emails about the three frame tents reach the salesperson who connected their mailbox, while a message they write in the can be answered by anyone on your team.
Email works with your own : a Gmail, Outlook, iCloud or IMAP account that you link to Filmo yourself. Filmo has no mailbox of its own; «Emails» shows what it has brought in from yours. See Connect your email to Filmo.
Two ways Filmo sends email
When you send a document, Filmo picks the path for you, person by person. If you have a connected mailbox, the email goes out from your address with the PDF attached. If you don't, it goes out through the , from Filmo's sender, with a instead of the PDF. Sending in bulk from a list always uses Filmo's service. See Send a document by email.
Statuses
| Where | Status | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Client conversation | «Active» / «Archived» | Archiving only hides it from the team's list. The client doesn't notice and can keep writing; their next message makes it active again. |
| Client conversation | With or without a responsible user | «Assign responsible users (optional)» or «Reassign» sets who on the team handles it. |
| Team chat channel | Archived | A channel administrator archived it. Nobody can write in it until it's unarchived. |
| Team chat conversation | «Archived» (for you) | You hid it from your own list. A new message doesn't bring it back. |
| Read, starred, in the trash | The same flags your email provider keeps. |
Where everything is
| You want to | Where | How |
|---|---|---|
| Connect your mailbox | «Settings» → «Integrations» | Connect your email to Filmo |
| Read and sort your email | «Emails» | Read and organize your email in Filmo |
| Tag incoming email automatically | «Settings» → «Others» → «Email» → «Email labels» | Label incoming email automatically |
| Know what NEO does with your email | The NEO marks in «Emails» | How NEO helps with your email |
| Turn an email into a quote or a task | NEO's bar above an email | Turn an email into a quote, order or task with NEO |
| Write or reply to an email | «Compose», or «Reply» on an email | Write and reply to email from Filmo |
| Send a quote or invoice | «Send» on the document | Send a document by email |
| Set the sender, templates and recipients | «Settings» → «Others» → «Email» | Email settings |
| See what was sent and whether it arrived | «Email History» | Email settings |
| Fix an email that didn't go out | The error you see | Why didn't my email send? |
| Answer a client's message | «Communication» → «Customer portal» | Answer client messages from the portal and website |
| Add a chat to your website | Website builder → «Support chat» | Add a chat to your website |
| Talk to your team | «Communication» → «Internal Chat», or the «Team chat» bubble | How team chat works |
| Create a channel or a direct message | «New conversation» in the team chat | Create a channel and add people |
In the sidebar, «Emails» and «Communication» are in the «Others» section. «Communication» shows a counter of conversations with unread messages.
Good to know
- The client chats and the have no permission of their own. Anyone with access to your account, even with a read-only role, can read and answer client conversations and assign them.
- An belongs to the whole account: its actions run on everyone's connected mailboxes, not only yours.
- Whether you hear about a new client message depends on your own alert settings. See Alerts and notifications settings.
- The team chat keeps its history: messages don't expire.
- On Campus accounts, support chats with app users also arrive in «Customer portal», and «App posts» publishes news to the app. See Answer Campus support chats.
- don't show «Communication» or «Emails» in the sidebar.
- Automations can also send emails, act on your mailbox and post in a team chat .
Up next
Start with your inbox: Read and organize your email in Filmo.