Four kinds of email
What arrives at a small team’s address comes in four kinds: customers, people selling to you, newsletters and automated notices, and spam. Inbox used to treat them all the same. Now each is handled differently.
- Customers get everything: the top of the list, the alert, and your auto-reply if you have one.
- Sales pitches, newsletters and automated notices land in a quiet group at the foot of the inbox, with no alert.
- Likely spam is put aside behind a second, fainter line below that.
- Paperwork about money, such as a supplier’s invoice or a statement, stays in the main list, because somebody has to deal with it.
Both lines stay pinned to the foot of the list however long it gets, and both start closed each time you come back.
Put aside, never thrown away
Inbox only ever decides how quiet an email should be. It doesn’t delete anything and it doesn’t block anyone; blocking is always your tap. Open a message it has put aside and a short note underneath says why, with the answers one tap away.
“It’s a customer” puts the conversation back in your main list, and Inbox trusts that sender from then on. “Keep it this way” confirms the call. Block sender and Block their domain are there because this is the moment you’re looking at a pitch and deciding you never want another, and both come with an Undo. If you simply reply to something that was put aside, it comes back as well: you answering is proof enough that it mattered.
When it isn’t sure, it leaves things alone
When someone you haven’t heard from before emails you, Inbox uses a small amount of AI to tell which of the four kinds it is. It acts only when it is confident. Anything it’s unsure about stays in your main list as normal. So does an email with almost nothing in it to judge, and so does anything from a company where someone is already your customer.
Most of what it puts aside is what it looks like. Now and then it isn’t: an email that reads as automated can turn out to be from a customer. That is the reason nothing is deleted. When Inbox gets one wrong, it costs you a tap.
Your auto-reply stops thanking mailing lists
If you have an auto-reply set, it used to go to everyone who emailed you, the newsletter and the cold pitch included. It now goes only to real enquiries.
Paperwork, sent to whoever does the books
The other thing in a small team’s inbox that isn’t a customer is paperwork: the supplier’s invoice, the statement, the receipt. It is real and someone has to deal with it, but that someone is usually a bookkeeper or an accountant, and until now the job was forwarding it by hand. Send to accounts does it in one tap, from the menu of any email. The first time, Inbox asks where your paperwork goes: your bookkeeper, or a receipts address such as the one Dext (the old Receipt Bank) gives you. After that the email and its attachments go to that address, sent from your own, with any reply coming back to you. We send ours to Stowary, our cloud storage app, which reads an invoice or receipt emailed to it and records it for your accounts.
It is always a person who presses it. Inbox recognises paperwork well enough to point the button out the first time some arrives, but it never forwards anything by itself: an invoice and a question can share an email, and that is your call to make. Each email goes once, so two of you can’t send the same invoice twice, and the conversation is tagged Accounts so you can find what has been passed on.
Where to find it
All of this is live now in the web app, on every account, at no extra cost, and it arrives on iPhone with the next update. There is nothing to switch on. The accounts address lives in Settings under Accounts, and anyone you’ve blocked is listed under Blocked senders, where one tap lets them back in. It works on email, which is where the noise is; Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram and live chat are unchanged.
Common questions
Does Vidual Inbox delete spam or block senders automatically?
No. It only decides how quiet an email should be. Newsletters and sales pitches go to a quiet group at the foot of the inbox and likely spam sits behind a second line, and all of it stays there for you to open. Blocking a sender or their whole domain is always your tap, with an Undo.
What happens if a real customer is put aside by mistake?
Open the conversation and tap “It’s a customer”, or simply reply. Either brings it back to your main list, and the tap teaches Inbox to trust that sender from then on. When Inbox isn’t confident, it leaves the email in your main list in the first place.
Can it forward invoices to my bookkeeper automatically?
No, and that is deliberate. Send to accounts is one tap from an email’s menu, and it sends that email with its attachments to the address you saved. A person always presses it, because an invoice and a customer’s question can arrive in the same email.
Does this work for Instagram and WhatsApp messages?
It works on email, which is where newsletters, sales pitches and paperwork arrive. Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram and live chat conversations are unchanged.
Vidual Inbox is available now at vidualinbox.com. 14-day free trial, no credit card required. £34.99/month after that, every feature, every team member.