How it works

Sending and receiving emails in Productlane enables you to reply to incoming support queries, feature requests, and bug reports. If you reply to a customer, it will be from your support email address, with the name of the user logged into Productlane. How it looks:

Sender: Raphael (Productlane)

Email: [email protected]

Note: You can set up only one email inbox per workspace.

How to set up your email inbox

1. Navigate to Productlane settings
   Below Workspace, you will find the Email Inbox, or click here to open the settings.

2. Choose your primary email
   Customers can contact you at this address, and outgoing emails will be sent from this address.

   Your support email cannot use the same domain as the email address you log into Productlane with. If you see the error "Use a different email than your login", pick a support address on a different domain, for example [email protected].

3. Enable email forwarding to receive emails
   To receive emails, you need to forward emails from your primary email to our special inbound address. Check the box for I have added forwarding and press Save and continue. How to set up email forwarding

4. Add DNS records to enable sending emails
   To enable Productlane to send emails on your behalf, you will need to verify your domain with us. Doing so will also assure email clients that emails are sent with your permission. After adding the DNS records to your domain, press Verify DNS records.

5. Final step: enable emails
   Click Enable emails and start using Productlane as your shared email inbox for customer support.

Forwarded email handling

When a customer forwards an email into your inbox, Productlane needs to decide who the thread should be attributed to - the original sender inside the forwarded message, or the person who forwarded it. You can control this behavior in Settings > Email Inbox > Forwarded email handling (or navigate directly to /settings/emails/forwarding).

Modes

• Original sender (default) - The thread is attributed to the sender parsed from the forwarded message body. Best for teams whose customers mostly forward messages from real people.

• Forwarder - The thread is always attributed to the person who sent the email to your inbox, regardless of its contents. Best for teams whose customers often forward receipts, invoices, or automated notifications.

Exceptions

When using Original sender mode, you can maintain an exceptions list of email addresses that should be treated as transactional senders (e.g., [email protected], [email protected]). When one of these addresses appears as the original sender of a forwarded email, the thread is attributed to the forwarder instead.

To manage exceptions:

1. Go to Settings > Email Inbox > Forwarded email handling.

2. Below the mode selector, you will see the Exceptions section.

3. Click Add to add an email address to the list.

4. To remove an exception, click the delete icon next to the entry.

Note: The exceptions list is only available when the mode is set to Original sender. Switch to that mode first if you need to add exceptions.

Troubleshooting: forwarded ticket shows the wrong sender, or the customer never gets your reply

If a forwarded ticket is attributed to your own company (or to an address like [email protected] or [email protected]) instead of the real customer, and your replies are not reaching that customer, the original-sender parser is picking up a transactional address from inside the forwarded email.

This happens when customers forward an automated or transactional email (such as a receipt, an invoice, or a notification your system sent) and add their own note. Productlane reads the sender in the forwarded message as the system address, not the person who forwarded it. Because the thread's contact is also the reply recipient, your reply goes back to that system address rather than to the customer.

To fix it, keep the mode on Original sender and add the system address to the Exceptions list. Add every address your system sends transactional mail from (for example, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]). New forwards from those addresses will be attributed to the person who forwarded them, and your replies will reach the right customer.

Auto-reply and out-of-office filtering

Productlane automatically discards inbound emails that are auto-replies or vacation responders so they do not open new threads or trigger the AI auto-reply. Detection uses both email headers and body text.

What is filtered

An email is silently dropped when any of the following is true:

• Auto-Submitted: auto-replied or Auto-Submitted: auto-notified header is present (RFC 3834 auto-reply markers).

• Vendor auto-reply headers are set to a non-"no" value: X-Autoreply, X-Autorespond, X-amzn-vacation, X-Vacationmessage.

• X-Zarafa-Rule-Action: reply is present (Zarafa/Kopano vacation rule).

• The message body contains recognized auto-reply or out-of-office phrases.

What is not filtered

Several headers that look like auto-reply signals are intentionally ignored because bulk senders (newsletters, transactional mailers, cold outreach tools) also set them, which previously caused legitimate customer emails to be lost:

• Auto-Submitted: auto-generated - used by receipts, notifications, and newsletters.

• Precedence: bulk - set by any bulk sender.

• Return-Path: <> - the classic bounce/mailing-list marker, but also set by many notification systems.

• X-Auto-Response-Suppress - a directive asking recipients not to auto-reply; it does not mean the message itself is an auto-reply.

Additionally, any email that carries a List-Unsubscribe or List-Id header is always treated as a mailing list message and never filtered as an auto-reply, regardless of other headers.

Email recipients in threads

Every email in a thread displays its To, CC, and BCC recipients directly below the sender. This makes it easy to see at a glance who received each message, whether it was a direct reply, a forwarded email, or a message with multiple people copied.

When the recipient list is long, it collapses to a single line. Click the expand arrow to reveal the full list.

Threads with multiple contacts

When multiple external people are involved in the same email thread, Productlane automatically updates the thread's contact to the person who sent the most recent inbound reply. This means the inbox overview always reflects who actually wrote the latest message, not just whoever started the conversation.

If the new sender doesn't exist as a contact in your workspace yet, Productlane creates one automatically.

This keeps your inbox accurate when conversations include CCs, forwards, or hand-offs between people on the customer side.