Email

The Email App gives your teammates addresses of their own. A teammate signs up to services, writes to customers and gets replies, without touching your personal inbox. Every mail your mailboxes receive lands in one Inbox, where you see which teammate has it and approve what it sends.

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Turn it on

Email is off until an owner or admin turns it on: in Settings → Apps, open Email and choose Turn on. Then give addresses from Mail settings (the gear at the top of the Inbox), tab Mailboxes, or from a teammate’s Access tab with Give an address. Every address on Brigade’s own domain, mails.brigade.lol, sends and receives at once, with nothing to set up.

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Addresses

• A teammate’s address, such as riley@mails.brigade.lol. It belongs to that teammate alone and can’t be given to another. Names are unique across Brigade and never given to anyone else: turn an address off and on again, and the same teammate gets it back. A taken name is offered as riley-2, and so on.
• Project addresses: in a project’s threads, the teammate writes from riley.<project>@mails.brigade.lol, shown as “Riley · Project”. Replies come back to that project. You don’t set these up.
• Sign-up addresses: a teammate can make a one-off address for a thread, to sign up to a service and receive its confirmation code there. The mail goes straight to the thread that made it.
• Shared mailboxes belong to a project rather than a teammate, for the addresses customers already write to. On Brigade’s domain, a shared mailbox gets a generated name such as support-acme-7f3k. Point your real address at it (see Your own domain), then choose which teammates read and reply from it.

To add one, choose Add a mailbox, pick An agent or A project, shared, then the address and its domain.

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Where incoming mail goes

Writing to a teammate’s address doesn’t put it to work by itself: anyone can write to that address, so a mail only reaches a teammate when it comes from a member of your workspace, answers mail a teammate sent, or matches a rule. Everything else waits in the Inbox until you hand it over or add a rule. Each mail goes to one place, in this order:

1. A thread waiting for it: a reply in a conversation the thread started, or mail to its sign-up address.
2. Its conversation’s thread, if one already has it.
3. A member’s request: mail from a member of your workspace to a teammate’s address starts or continues a thread with that teammate, as if you had typed it. It must come from the email address of the member’s Brigade account (another address of yours counts as anyone’s), and the mail server must prove it (DKIM or DMARC), since anyone can write a member’s address in From. Automatic mail (newsletters, notifications) doesn’t count.
4. The mailbox’s rules, in their order. The first that matches starts a thread with its teammate. A rule starts up to 50 threads a day; past that, mail waits in the Inbox and you get a ticket. A rule whose teammate is Nobody: keep it in the Inbox starts no thread: the mail it matches waits in the Inbox, unassigned, until you hand it to a teammate. On a Gmail account, that is how Brigade keeps mail without starting work.
5. The Inbox, unassigned, for 30 days.

A mailbox’s page, in Mail settings › Mailboxes, shows its settings in a few lines: Arrives (where its mail comes in), New mail goes to (its rules, reordered there by an owner or admin), Access (the teammates who can read and send from it when asked; a shared mailbox or Gmail account only, since a teammate’s own address is read by that teammate alone) and Replies. Send a test mail checks that the address receives. A conversation that sends mail to threads 8 times within an hour is stopped as a loop.

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The Inbox

Inbox, under Today in the sidebar, lists every conversation your mailboxes received, one row per conversation, newest first. It also shows Gmail accounts: all mail of a shared account when its menu has Show all its mail in the Inbox, otherwise only mail that went to a thread. A member’s own Gmail shows to them alone. Filter by source, agent, project or words. From a conversation you can:

• Hand to… a teammate, with a note: the conversation then belongs to that thread.
• Add a rule (owners and admins) so the next mail like it goes to a teammate.
• When a teammate needs you and didn’t reply: Ask Riley to reply, Discuss with Riley (with your teammate’s name), or Reply myself, which sends from the mailbox as you, Gmail’s too.

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Sending and approvals

A teammate sends from its thread’s mailbox: its own address, the project’s shared mailbox, or a Gmail account. Each mailbox has one rule for what its teammates send, the same for Brigade’s addresses and Gmail, under Mail settings › a mailbox › Replies:

• Teammates reply on their own (the default): they answer when the answer is clear. What needs your judgment (money, a promise, a complaint, a doubt) comes to your To do unanswered, with their reason.
• Approve every email: each email waits in your To do as a draft to approve, change or discard.

A teammate whose write policy asks first still asks for its email too. The approval card shows who it goes to, the subject, files and text. The member who started the thread, or an owner or admin, can:

• Approve & send: it leaves 30 seconds later and can be cancelled until then.
• Send later: pick a time up to 30 days ahead. It shows under Scheduled and can be cancelled until it leaves.
• Edit the draft first, then send it.
• Discard it.

The same card shows in the thread and at the end of the conversation in the Inbox. A teammate can also schedule mail itself (“send it Monday at 9”), within the same 30 days. Before anyone is asked, Brigade checks that a reply goes only to the conversation’s people (unless the teammate adds recipients on purpose), that files come from the thread, and that the text holds no secret.

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Replies come back to the thread

When someone replies to mail a teammate sent, the reply wakes the thread that sent it, with the teammate’s context. You don’t need to tell it to check. A delivery failure wakes the thread too. If someone already answered from the mailbox itself, the teammate’s own reply after it is refused.

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Your own domain

To send as support@yourcompany.com, add your domain in Mail settings › Domains with Add a domain (owners and admins). Brigade reads where its mail goes today and asks How its mail reaches Brigade:

• By forwarding: mail stays with your provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365…). You forward each address to its mailbox’s address on Brigade’s domain. The mailbox page says what to forward where, and shows Google’s confirmation code when it arrives.
• Directly: the domain’s MX points to Brigade and every address works at once. This is refused while your MX points to another provider, since it would take that mail away. Use a subdomain such as team.yourcompany.com.

Then add the DNS records Brigade shows at your DNS provider. If the domain’s DNS is on Cloudflare and you connected Cloudflare, Add them on Cloudflare adds them for you, without replacing any record. Brigade checks the records every ten minutes, or at once with Check now. A domain belongs to one workspace. Removing it stops mail going out as it; its mailboxes keep their address on Brigade’s domain.

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Limits

Mail a thread has is kept with that thread. Gmail mail you didn’t share with the Inbox, and that went to no thread, is never stored.