Mail

Mail shows the mailboxes you belong to, on the hosted email domains your shop set up under Settings → Email. Personal mailboxes are yours; shared mailboxes (service@, parts@) are worked by a team. You reach them all from one place, and each conversation carries the customer it belongs to.

Mail appears in the sidebar once hosted email is on for your shop and you are a member of at least one mailbox. The number beside it is how many conversations are unread across every mailbox you belong to.

The three panes

• Mailboxes on the left: All inboxes on top (everything you belong to, newest first), then each mailbox with its colour, its unread count and its folders. Shared mailboxes also offer Assigned to me and Unassigned.
• Conversations in the middle: one row per thread, newest activity first. Bold means unread. A star means flagged, a paperclip means it has an attachment, and in the unified view a colour chip says which mailbox it arrived in.
• The conversation on the right: every message in the thread, oldest first, with the newest one open.

On a phone the three panes stack: pick a mailbox, then a conversation, then read it, with a back step at each stage. The address bar always says exactly where you are, so any view can be bookmarked or sent to a colleague who has access.

Reading

Click a conversation to open it. Older messages in a thread are collapsed — click one to expand it.

Remote images are blocked until you ask for them. Images hosted elsewhere tell the sender that you opened the message and roughly where you are, so Shop Commander does not fetch them on its own. When a message has any, the reading pane says so and offers Load images for that message.

Attachments are listed under each message. Click one to download it. Shop Commander always downloads attachments rather than opening them in the browser, whatever the file claims to be.

Marking read

• A personal mailbox works the way your phone's mail app does: opening a conversation marks it read everywhere, including in Outlook or Apple Mail on your own devices.
• A shared mailbox tracks read state per person. Your colleague opening a conversation does not clear it from your list, and clearing it from yours does not hide it from theirs. Whether opening it also marks it read for outside mail clients is a per-mailbox setting.

A conversation added to a shared mailbox before you joined is not counted as unread for you — you start from the day you were added, not from the mailbox's whole history.

Working a conversation

What you can do depends on your role in that mailbox (owner, agent or viewer) and can be adjusted per person under Settings → Email.

• Mark read / unread — always available to anyone who can read the mailbox.
• Flag — a star for anything you want to find again.
• Archive — out of the inbox, still searchable.
• Trash — Shop Commander empties Trash after 30 days and Junk after 14. Owners with permission can delete something from Trash sooner.

Writing and replying

New message at the top of the conversation list starts a fresh message from the mailbox you are in. Reply, Reply all and Forward sit above the conversation and under every expanded message, so you can answer the message you are actually reading rather than the newest one in the thread.

The composer opens beside the conversation on a wide screen and fills the screen on a phone. Escape closes it; nothing is lost when it does.

• From is the send-as address for that mailbox. If a mailbox has more than one, pick the one this message should come from. If it has none, the composer says so — send-as addresses are set up under Settings → Email.
• To, Cc and Bcc are chips. Type an address and press Enter, comma or semicolon to turn it into one; Backspace on an empty box removes the last one. An address the mail server refuses is shown with the server's own reason, not a guess.
• The subject, the recipients and the quoted original of a reply or forward come from Shop Commander when the draft is created, so what you see quoted is what actually goes out.
• The body has a deliberately small set of formatting: bold, italic, underline, bulleted and numbered lists, links, quotes and inline code. There are no tables, fonts, sizes or colours, because mail that uses them renders differently in every mail app that receives it. Plain text turns formatting off entirely.

Drafts save themselves about five seconds after you stop typing, and again whenever you click out of the composer. The indicator beside the buttons says what actually happened — Not saved yet, Saving…, or Saved with the time the server recorded. It never says Saved before a save has succeeded.

Discard deletes the draft and anything attached to it. Nothing is sent.

Drafts in a shared mailbox are yours alone. Two people replying to the same conversation cannot overwrite each other's half-written message.

Attachments

Attach files uploads straight from your device. Each file shows as Uploading… while it goes up and becomes a chip when the server has it; the chip has an × to remove it again. The composer states the per-file and per-message size limits for that mailbox and refuses a file that is over either one before uploading it, rather than after.

Send later

Tick Send later and pick a date and time to queue the message instead of sending it now. The time is your shop's local time. Until it goes out it is still a draft you can open and change.

If a send fails

The button says Sending while it works, and a failure shows the server's reason and leaves the draft exactly as it was. Press Send again to retry: Shop Commander uses the same send key for every attempt in one composer session, so a retry after a timeout cannot deliver the message twice.

Assigning, status and snooze

Shared mailboxes carry workflow above the messages. Personal mailboxes do not, unless workflow has been turned on for them.

• Open / Waiting / Done — Open is anything that needs an answer. Waiting means the ball is with the customer. Done closes it. A new message from the customer reopens a conversation that was Waiting or Done.
• Snooze hides a conversation until a time you choose — later today, tomorrow morning, next Monday, or a date you pick. A reply from the customer wakes it sooner.
• Assignee is one person or nobody. Assign to me is one click. Assigning tells that person and adds them as a watcher.
• Watch puts you on the conversation without owning it: you are told about replies without being the assignee.

Done and reopen also move the conversation between Inbox and Archive in the mailbox itself, so people using Outlook or Apple Mail on the same mailbox see the same shape.

If a colleague changes the same conversation while you have it open, Shop Commander refuses the stale change and says Someone else changed this. Reload. — then shows you what the conversation actually looks like now. Your click is not quietly applied to something you did not see.

Internal notes and mentions

A note is for your team. It is never part of a reply or a forward, it never reaches the customer, and it is drawn in its own colour with Internal note — not sent to the customer on every single one.

Type @ and a name to mention a colleague. Pick them from the list and the mention becomes a chip; they are told, and they become a watcher on the conversation. You can only mention people who are members of that mailbox — a mention of anyone else is dropped.

You can delete your own notes. Notes other people wrote stay.

Who else is in this conversation

When a colleague has the same conversation open, the header says so — and Avery is replying… when they are actually writing. It is a warning, not a lock: you can always reply anyway. It disappears on its own when they leave.

Linking to a record

Link to… searches customers, vehicles, repair orders and appointments and attaches the one you pick to the conversation. A link is a pointer: it shows the record's name and takes you there. Nothing from the conversation is copied into the record, and nothing from the record is copied into the message.

Activity

Under the messages is the record of what has happened to the conversation — who assigned it, who changed the status, who replied, what was linked, who was mentioned. It shows the most recent few and expands to the rest. A change made from Outlook or Apple Mail rather than from Shop Commander says changed in an email app, because the person who last touched it here did not make it.

The customer beside the conversation

Shop Commander matches the sender's address against your customers. When it finds exactly one, the panel beside the conversation shows that customer with their vehicles, open repair orders and upcoming appointments, each a link into the rest of the app. Nothing on that panel changes the customer — it is there so you do not have to search for them in another tab.

When the address matches nobody, or matches more than one customer, use Link to a customer to say who it is. Choose Remember this address and the address is saved on that customer, so their next message is matched on its own. A link you make by hand is never overwritten by automatic matching.

Search

The search box searches subjects, senders and participants across the mailbox you are in, or across every mailbox from the unified view.

When the mail server is not answering

Shop Commander keeps its own index of every message's sender, subject, date and attachments, so the list and the counts still work if the mail server is unreachable. When that happens the mailbox is marked Mail server not responding: you can still browse and search, but opening a message body, downloading an attachment or moving a conversation waits until the server is back. Nothing is lost — Shop Commander catches up on its own, and Check now asks it to try immediately.

What Mail is not, yet

AI summaries and suggested drafts are not here yet. Neither are mail rules that file or forward messages on their own, signatures per person rather than per mailbox, or connecting an outside Gmail or Microsoft 365 account. Estimates and invoices are still sent from the repair order, not attached from the composer.

Setting mailboxes up

Creating mailboxes and aliases, adding people to a shared mailbox, changing what a member may do, connecting Outlook or Apple Mail with an app password, and the domain's DNS records all live under Settings → Email. You need mailbox administration permission to see them.