Email

Your receptionist's email address

Every business gets its own address, like [email protected]. You'll find it under your conversations in the Inbox, with a button to copy it.

To have your receptionist answer your business email, set your email account to pass incoming mail on to that address. You can also put the address on your website.

• Gmail: Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, Add a forwarding address. Gmail emails a confirmation code to the receptionist's address; we pass that email on to your business email, so you can finish the setup.
• Outlook: make a rule that redirects messages to the address. (Forwarding instead makes them look like they came from you.) Some work accounts block automatic forwarding until the account admin allows it.

The address shows up once email is set up for the platform. Whoever runs Just a Good Guy does this once: see setting up email.

How it answers

Your receptionist uses the same rules as chat and texts (see What the AI will and won't do):

• Replies are short, polite, plain-text emails, signed with your business name, with a line saying they come from your virtual receptionist.
• They're sent from your business name, with Reply-To set to the email in your business details. When a customer hits Reply, it reaches you.
• Emails from the same person within 3 days are one conversation, and replies stay in the same email thread. Earlier quoted messages are cut, so the receptionist only reads what's new.
• Links can only point to your booking pages or your own website.
• It only ever writes back to the person who emailed. It ignores anything in an email asking it to send messages to someone else.

Before it shares or changes someone's bookings, it checks it's really them: either the email is signed by their email provider (most are), or it emails them a 6-digit code.

What it doesn't answer

• Out-of-office and other automatic replies, bounced mail, newsletters and mailing lists
• Email that looks like spam or fails the sender checks
• Email from your own business address, so it never answers itself. To try it out, send an email from a different address.
• Very large emails (over 10 MB, usually big attachments). You still have them in your own mailbox.
• More than 10 emails an hour from one person

Replying yourself

Open the conversation in your Inbox and type. Your reply goes out as an email to them, in the same thread. That takes the conversation over: the receptionist stops replying in it, and you get an alert for each new email. Turn take-over off to hand it back.

Which way customers hear from you

People who email you get their confirmations and reminders by email, not by text. Everyone else follows the same rule as WhatsApp and texts.