Most of your customers will probably write to you by email. Forward your support address (such as support@yourcompany.com) to Tender and every email becomes a discussion, attachments and all. When your team replies in Tender, the customer gets the reply by email; when they answer, their email is added to the same discussion. Your customers keep emailing you as before, and you get everything in one place.
Choose a category for each support address
Each address forwards to one category. Many teams send support@ to a "Problems" or "Questions" category and feedback@ to "Suggestions", for example.
- In your dashboard, go to Account & Settings › Email Setup (Sending & Receiving in the sidebar).
- In the box for the category, click On.
- In Users send email to this address, enter your support address. A category can have several addresses, separated with commas:
help@yourcompany.com, support@yourcompany.com. - Click Save forwarding settings.
Each box also shows Forward your emails to: the category's secret forwarding address, something like tender+c1a2b3c4d5@tenderapp.com. Don't publish it; your customers keep writing to your own address.
You don't need to list your support staff's own addresses: Tender already knows them.
Forward your support address to Tender
In your email service, forward everything that arrives at your support address to the category's forwarding address:
- Setting up forwarding in Gmail (also for Google Workspace mailboxes and groups)
- Setting up forwarding (generic) for every other service
Test your forward
Send an email to your support address from a personal address, one that doesn't belong to your support staff. Within a minute or two it should appear in your dashboard under Pending.
Use an outside address because Tender treats email from your own staff differently: a discussion your staff start doesn't go into Pending (you already know about it), so a test from your work address seems to go missing. It's there under All.
To check the forward keeps working, turn on heartbeats.
How Tender reads incoming email
- The sender is the From address. Tender gives the email to the person whose account has the address in the email's From line, or starts a new customer with that address if no one has it.
- Reply-To is shown to your staff. Some emails ask for replies to go to another address (their Reply-To). When a customer with no account sends one, Tender records the Reply-To address as the sender, so your replies reach the address they asked for. When the Reply-To differs from the From address, your staff see both above the message (From: and Reply-To:). If the Reply-To address isn't anyone's yet, you can click Add to name's addresses to make it one of that customer's addresses: from then on, mail from it is theirs, and so are their earlier messages from it.
- Quoted text is folded away. When a customer replies by email, Tender keeps their new text and leaves out the earlier messages quoted below it. Your staff can click Show quoted content under an emailed message to see what was cut, or Original to see the email exactly as it arrived. Customers see only the new text.
- New discussions from email are private: only your staff and the people in the discussion can see them. You can make one public afterwards.
- Replies from someone else. If someone who isn't part of a private discussion replies to its email (for example, a customer writing from their personal address instead of their work one), Tender doesn't add them to it. Their message becomes a new discussion, and your staff see a note offering to merge it into the original. See How do I merge two discussions?
Read more
- Using a custom "reply-to": choose the address customers see when they reply.
- Setting up your site autoresponders: acknowledge new requests automatically.
- Forwarding emails from customers to Tender: get a customer's personal email into Tender.
- Troubleshooting & Heartbeats: when an email doesn't arrive.