The Slate Inbox feature allows your institution to directly manage multiple office email accounts hosted by email clients such as Gmail and Outlook and incoming text messages in Slate. For example, At Slate University, emails sent to "[email protected]" are set up to forward to the university's Inbox, where you can view messages, reply to, and manage them effectively. 

This system offers several benefits that streamline and improve communication with prospective students.

• Efficient Management of Emails: The system automatically associates incoming messages with existing person records when matched to an email address or mobile number on record. This eliminates the need for manually matching emails and reduces the chances of errors. In addition, you can create inbox groups and roles to control which messages are displayed to specific groups of users. This ensures that only relevant messages are visible to the admissions staff members and reduces clutter. Communication history is visible on the interactions section of the person record. 

• Automated Assignments: The system also allows for automation in assigning messages to staff members. Messages can be automatically assigned to an individual staff member or a group based on predefined criteria. This helps distribute the workload evenly and ensures no messages are left unanswered. Independent of any automation, a user can re-route a message to a specific destination or role and review messages exchanged with the recipient recently.

• Flexible Management Options: Messages can also be managed in batch, forwarded, starred, routed to SPAM/junk folders, and otherwise manipulated to handle and resolve incoming mail. This gives staff members a wide range of options to manage their inboxes effectively and efficiently. You can forward messages, and email attachments can be sent. You can also add snippets (predefined content blocks) with common responses, and the text of these snippets is searchable. Data points associated with Inbox messages can be queried on using the query builder or pulled into reports using the report builder. Messages can also be tracked more granularly using message-scoped fields to store message metadata. Message history is recorded in an audit log, and you can create custom dashboards to display person record data.

Inbox Message Life Cycle

When an email is sent to your existing email address that is configured to forward messages into Inbox, the email is queued in Slate for the following actions:

This process can take up to 15 minutes, but it typically completes sooner.

Once a message has a role, users assigned that role permission can view, reply to, reassign, and update the status of the message (see below).

If there are active nightly processing rules on the message Inbox population, every evening between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. Eastern Time, all messages that are either open or resolved within the past 7 days enter a queue to have those rules processed.

When a message is marked as resolved, it can be viewed for 7 days within Inbox when viewing recently resolved messages. These messages continue to appear on the assigned person records. Messages should be marked as resolved when they no longer require staff attention.

Inbox Interface

When you navigate to the Inbox page, users can view messages that are assigned to their roles and that require a response. The messages can be filtered by role, assignment (such as unassigned or assigned to the user), status (such as open or recently resolved), and by using search terms that will search both the subject and content of the message.

Clicking a message will display a conversation history page, which contains the specific message along with the five most recent messages sent to or from the associated record in the past 60 days.

In this view, users can also draft and send a response, change the assigned person record, reassign the message to a different role or user, and change the status to resolved. For more details about each of these functions, refer to the Configure Inbox section of this article.

The link to the assigned record displays the preferred name if one exists. If one does not, the first name appears.