Manually Forward Email to Help Scout

Every now and then, you might get an email in your inbox that needs to be a conversation in Help Scout. All you have to do is forward the email from your personal mailbox to your Help Scout Inbox, and we'll take care of the rest.

A Primer on Manual Forwarding

When you forward or reply to only your inbox address with no other recipients, we'll pull out the original sender and set their address as the customer in Help Scout. If you add any additional recipients along with the inbox address, we will set the customer as you, the Help Scout User, instead.

A few things to remember when manually forwarding emails:

• The email address you're forwarding from, e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com, must be one that is on your Help Scout User account, either as your User profile address that you use to log in with, or as an Alternate Email in your User profile. See Manage Your User Profile for help with that. 
• When you forward an email, we'll attempt to recognize your signature and remove it from the incoming email.
• A forwarded email becomes a new conversation when it lands in your Help Scout Inbox.
• The timestamp of that new conversation will be the time that Help Scout receives the forwarded email.  
• If you add any text to the forward, that text will become a note in Help Scout.
• Use email commands to perform various conversations actions.
• The Inbox auto reply is not sent for conversations created from a manual forward. 
• You can forward emails to your custom Inbox address if you've connected one, e.g. help@yourdomain.com. You can also forward directly to your Help Scout Inbox address, e.g. help@yoursubdomain.helpscoutapp.com or support...@helpscout.net. 

Manually Forward from Outlook

In certain cases, emails forwarded from Outlook will not contain the email address of the original sender in the actual forward. Without that email address, Help Scout can't associate the conversation with a customer. If you find that your manual forwards show up in Help Scout with you as the user when forwarding from Outlook, use the Forward as Attachment option in Outlook instead of just a regular forward.

Outlook 2007 & higher: Select the email in the list of emails or open it in its own window and press ctrl + alt + F. 

Outlook 2003: Just drag the email into a new email. This will force Outlook to forward it as an attachment.

Email Commands for Manual Forwards

Use these commands to add notes, assign, tag, or change the status of a conversation (or more!) as soon as it lands in the Help Scout Inbox when manually forwarding your email.