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Hello everyone 👋

I've been working with airtable for years as a consultant and user, but have never been active in the community - that's about to change. 

I'm super interested in anything to do with airtable and emails as I keep seeing a few challenges: 

  • The challenge of receiving and tracking email responses.
  • Replies to emails sent via Airtable end up in the void instead of the shared inbox
  • Record limits quickly become a problem when saving emails as records
  • Threading issue when parsing emails and creating records in Airtable

As I'm thinking of clever ways to solve these problems, I'm eager to hear feedback from the community. 
 

If you've worked on something like this before, use airtable + emails frequently, or have any of the above issues, please let me know!

Hi ​@Konrad, I gave you a few handy tips in this post.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

​@ScottWorld Thanks! 
How do you see the shared inbox issue? Did you ever have this challenge before or worked on sth like that? 

What issue are you having with a shared inbox?

​@ScottWorld I see teams using a general gmail address (like support@)to authenticate and send airtable emails. Often the replies and up somewhere and are not checked and/or not every team member has access to the inbox.
Even though this is not an airtable problem, I see this often when emails are sent via tools and I am interested if others experience things like that.

You may want to check out Front, which makes it easier for teams to work with shared inboxes.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

​@ScottWorld I see teams using a general gmail address (like support@)to authenticate and send airtable emails. Often the replies and up somewhere and are not checked and/or not every team member has access to the inbox.
Even though this is not an airtable problem, I see this often when emails are sent via tools and I am interested if others experience things like that.

Hmm, wouldn’t a solution to this be having multiple copied Send Email automations variable on a field in the record like Single Select with options for IT, Fiscal, HR, that may look the same but have their “Reply To” option changed to direct to the correct person. That way it all looks to the outside user like it comes from support@xyz.com, but when they reply it goes directly to jane.doe@xyz.com for an issue tagged HR, but goes to john.smith@xyz.com for an issue tagged as IT (which doesn’t need to be visible to the outside user). 

Of course, it’d also help if teams would check their shared inboxes, but some problems are just immutable 😝

Yes, “reply to” is the best way to solve that issue!

Hello Konrad 

You're raising some great points! A quick tip: For tracking email responses, try integrating Outlook or Gmail with Airtable using Make or Zapier. This can help log replies directly into your table instead of losing them.

For a smarter way to handle threading and record limits, there are some advanced tricks you can use. If you’d like more details, feel free to reach out—I’d be happy to guide you!

​@Marvel_digitals this comes with a large amount of records as you would probably create a record per mail? 

​@ScottWorld I see teams using a general gmail address (like support@)to authenticate and send airtable emails. Often the replies and up somewhere and are not checked and/or not every team member has access to the inbox.
Even though this is not an airtable problem, I see this often when emails are sent via tools and I am interested if others experience things like that.

Hmm, wouldn’t a solution to this be having multiple copied Send Email automations variable on a field in the record like Single Select with options for IT, Fiscal, HR, that may look the same but have their “Reply To” option changed to direct to the correct person. That way it all looks to the outside user like it comes from support@xyz.com, but when they reply it goes directly to jane.doe@xyz.com for an issue tagged HR, but goes to john.smith@xyz.com for an issue tagged as IT (which doesn’t need to be visible to the outside user). 

Of course, it’d also help if teams would check their shared inboxes, but some problems are just immutable 😝

 ​@DisraeliGears01 great idea! Advantage is also that these sender would not need to be verified I guess..

Guys, thanks for your input!
I spent the last days putting what I heard here and elsewhere into a small custom product as zapier, make and n8n just did not do the job for me. I am working on the following features:

✅ Send emails from verified sender addresses (e.g., konrad@, help@)
✅ Create and use beautiful and professional email templates.
✅ Track email status right in Airtable (sent, opened, clicked, bounced).
✅ Get replies into Airtable and/or a shared inbox, making collaboration with team members easy (assign, tag, highlight, reply).
✅ Easily save, sort, filter, and search emails, threads, contacts, and attachments without hitting record limits in airtable.
⁇ Have seen some similar issued with sms updates which I could probably add as well 🤷

Real-world example:
Send an email requesting the document via direct reply.
Build Airtable automations based on statuses (opened, replied, bounced) and assign responses directly to team members who can follow up via email. 

Works standalone and in a browser extension.

If anyone thinks this is cool and wants to give it a try + provide feedback I am more than happy as this might also help others 🙏

 




 

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