Inbox

The Inbox is where you and your members talk to each other. One thread per person, so everything you have ever said to them is in one place rather than scattered across forwarded emails.

It also holds a separate thread between you and the MemberZone team, so you can ask us something without leaving the app.

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Finding it

Inbox sits in the left sidebar. The number beside it counts threads waiting on you, not messages, so a member who sends four messages in a row shows as one.

You need the View Inbox or Manage Inbox permission to see it. Viewing lets you read threads; managing lets you send. See Team and permissions to grant them.

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Member threads

Starting one

Two ways:

• From the Inbox: click New message and search for the person.
• From anywhere you see a member: the Message action on a contact or member sidebar opens their thread directly.

Anyone with a profile at your business can be messaged, including contacts who never joined a program. If they have no email address on file there is nothing to send to, so add one first.

What the member sees

Every message you send reaches them two ways:

1. In their member account, under Messages.
2. As an email, about a minute later.

The delay is deliberate. If they are already reading the thread in their account, the email never goes out. That minute is what keeps a conversation from turning into a pile of notifications. Several messages sent back to back go out together as one email.

When they reply by email

They can just hit reply. Their response lands back in the thread, and you see it in the Inbox exactly as if they had typed it in their account. Nobody has to log in to answer you.

Replies are cleaned up on the way in: the quoted copy of your message underneath gets trimmed, so the thread reads as a conversation instead of each message carrying the whole history inside it.

Out-of-office and other automatic replies are recognized and filed quietly. They will not mark the thread as needing an answer.

Open and resolved

A thread is Open until you resolve it. Resolving is just triage - it clears the thread out of your queue and nothing happens to the member. If they write again, it reopens on its own.

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AI drafts

When a member writes to you, MemberZone can write a suggested reply and leave it waiting for you. Nothing is ever sent on its own: you see the draft, and you choose.

• Send uses it as written.
• Edit lets you change it first, then send.
• Discard throws it away.
• Regenerate asks for a different attempt.

What it is allowed to know

A draft is written from your own records, not from guesswork:

• Your business details, your published FAQ, and your storefront About text
• The programs and plans you offer, including what a member is allowed to skip or cancel themselves, and your cancellation policy
• What this member is on, when it next moves, and whether they owe anything
• Their last three orders with you, and the tracking status of anything shipped
• The recent messages in the thread

If the answer is not in there, the draft says it will check rather than inventing something. A confident wrong answer about someone's delivery or their money is worse than a slow one, so this is the behavior to expect.

It will not see another member's records, and it will not see memberships the person holds at a different business.

Turning it on, and teaching it

AI drafts are off until you turn them on, under Inbox settings.

Two fields there do most of the work:

• Instructions: house rules in your own words. The things that were never written down anywhere - that your pickup party is the second Saturday, that you never discount shipping, that you always offer a swap before a cancellation. Drafts follow these.
• Signature: how you close a message. Appended to drafts so they sound like you.

Instructions are the highest-value thing on the page. Everything else the drafter can read from your account; this is the only place to tell it what it cannot look up.

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Messaging the MemberZone team

Your support thread works the same way as a member thread, except the other side is us.

Three ways in:

• Message support on the Help page.
• Still stuck? Talk to a human at the bottom of a Zoe chat.
• Ask Zoe to pass it on. She will show you what she is about to send and wait for you to confirm.

All three need the View Inbox or Manage Inbox permission, because our reply lands in the Inbox. Without either, the Help page offers our email address instead.

When the handoff comes out of a Zoe chat, the conversation is attached automatically. Whoever picks it up can see what Zoe already tried, so you do not have to explain it twice.

Your thread with us sits pinned at the top of the Inbox, above your member conversations and unaffected by the filters. Our replies arrive there and are emailed to you, and you can reply to that email.

One difference from a member thread: you cannot mark a support thread resolved. That flag is how we track what we still owe you an answer on, so we clear it rather than you.

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Things worth knowing

• Replying by email needs setup on our side. If it is not configured yet, your messages still send and still arrive, and the "just reply to this email" line is left out. A member who hits reply anyway reaches your business's reply-to address (or your contact email if you have not set one), the same as any other email we send them for you, so that reply lands in your own mailbox rather than the Inbox. Members can always answer from their account.
• You can reply by email too. The email telling you a member wrote in can be answered directly. Your reply is posted to the thread as your business and sent on to the member. It is attributed to you when it comes from the address on your team account, or to the business when it comes from your contact or reply-to address; from any other address it is still posted, marked as unverified.
• A message that could not be emailed says so. Under your own messages you will occasionally see a note that it was not emailed - no address on file, a bounced address, or sending to that person being paused. The message still sits in the thread, and they will see it if they sign in, but do not assume it reached them. Reach out another way for anything time-sensitive.
• Attachments sent with an emailed reply are saved and shown in the thread when they are photos, PDFs, or plain text files up to 10 MB. Other kinds of file are left out for safety.
• A very long emailed reply is cut to fit and marked as shortened, rather than lost.
• A message from an address we do not recognize is still filed on the thread and marked, so you can see it did not come from the member's own email.
• Notes are not messages. A note is for your team and the member never sees it. Use Customer notes for that.