Challenges With Forwarding Your Personal Address
We love that you’re finding Help Scout so useful for your team’s email! While it might be tempting to route all of your email through the app, Help Scout isn’t meant to replace your personal inbox. It’s built for shared communication — where multiple people work together to support customers.
In this guide, we’ll explain why it’s best to keep individual email addresses out of Help Scout.
First things first, let's start by marking the difference between a User and an Inbox:
A User in Help Scout is typically a single person that is logging in to the app, to answer emails.
They have an email address tied to their User profile, and the email address is the login identifier. Typically, a User email address will be that person's individual email address at your organization, e.g. josie.gato@jgclothing.co.
An Inbox in Help Scout is meant to be a shared inbox that multiple members of your team need to manage.
This address is typically a general address, e.g. support@jgclothing.xyz.
A User address should not be the same as any Inbox address, and we don't recommend using Help Scout to manage the inbox of a personal individual email. Here's why:
Help Scout isn't designed to be a personal email client.
Help Scout is built for shared email addresses like support@ or info@ — places where a team works together to help customers. It makes collaboration easy without losing that personal touch, and every feature is designed with teamwork in mind.
Traditional email apps, on the other hand, are made for managing individual inboxes. They include tools Help Scout doesn’t — and isn’t meant to — replicate. Our help desk isn’t a replacement for your personal or 1:1 email.
You need to work exclusively from Help Scout.
If you forward a personal address to Help Scout, you must reply from Help Scout only. Replies sent from your regular email app won’t appear in Help Scout, breaking the conversation thread and making it hard to track or report on those messages. Once forwarding is set up, manage that email solely in Help Scout.
You can't use the email notification features.
If your User address matches your Inbox address, Help Scout won’t send email notifications — it would create a loop and clog up your Inbox. You’ll miss out on tools like Respond to Email Notifications to Take Action in Help Scout and other alerts listed in Manage Help Scout Notifications.
It's up to you!
You’re welcome to use Help Scout for individual email, but it’s not what the product is built for — and we don’t recommend it. Our focus is on making shared email even better for teams, so that’s where ongoing improvements will be.