▣The inbox in everyday use

Because here the reply lands with the contact, not in a mailbox.

What that means in everyday work:

• The history is complete. Anyone who opens the contact sees campaign, reply and note in one place.
• Colleagues see it too. Nobody but you knows about a reply in your Outlook.
• You can carry on working straight away: set a follow-up, change the category, write a note.

That does not mean you have to give up Outlook: your mailbox stays your mailbox; Aurora Hive Sales reads along. What you do there — read, move, delete — has no effect back here.

The advice from practice: handle replies to campaigns here, everything else as usual.

Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and every message is dealt with completely the first time you look at it:

1. Read.
2. Decide: reply, forward, file away.
3. Note on the contact, if it contained anything of substance.
4. Follow-up, if something remains open.
5. Out of the way — archive it or mark it as read.

What you should not do: open a message, think “I’ll do that later” and move on. That is the road to an inbox with 200 unread entries that nobody touches any more.

The rule behind it is old and true: anything that takes two minutes gets done straight away. Everything else gets a date.

Check whether it should be a contact — and then decide:

• Enquiry from someone you do not know: create a contact, directly from the message. That way the history is complete from the start.
• Reply from another address at the same business: add the address to the existing contact or create a second contact.
• Advertising, job application, invoice: not a case for your records. Archive it.

Matching happens automatically via the email address. If someone replies from a different address — from their phone, from another mailbox — the message lands under “Unknown”, even though the person is known.

That is the most common case, and it is dealt with in two clicks.

This happens with shared mailboxes and generic addresses: if three people write via info@, Aurora Hive Sales cannot tell them apart.

What you do: correct the matching by hand. The message moves to the right contact, and the history is correct again.

What you can do to prevent it:

• Keep personal addresses up to date, where they exist. A generic address as the only detail is rarely helpful for a contact.
• For businesses with several contact persons, create one contact per person, not one for the company.

And after a correction, check whether a note or follow-up is attached to the wrong contact.

After every campaign — that is normal and unavoidable.

How to deal with it:

• Do not simply delete them. Out-of-office notes often contain the most useful thing about the entire campaign: the return date and the name of the stand-in.
• Return date as a follow-up. A call on the day after someone returns is one of the best there is.
• Permanent absence — “has left the company” — is hard information: adjust the contact, sort out the address, and if appropriate create the named successor as a new contact.

The rest goes into the archive. Ten minutes after each campaign, and the inbox is usable again.

To turn a list into a work list:

• Unread — what nobody has looked at yet.
• Known — replies from contacts. This is the most important list, because this is where the work is.
• Unknown — senders without a contact. Usually new enquiries or replies from other addresses.
• Archive — done.

The process that works: go through “Known” first (that is the harvest of your campaigns), then “Unknown” (those are the new opportunities), then the rest.

What you do not need: the inbox as a second email program. It is there for replies to your outreach, not for all your correspondence.

Yes, and that is usually the right way, because the reply then appears in the history.

When you should still do it in your usual email program:

• Long, individual replies with attachments and formatting.
• Messages in which you copy someone in.
• Anything that belongs to a matter that runs by email anyway.

If you reply outside: write a short note on the contact. Otherwise a colleague sees an enquiry without a reply and gets in touch a second time.

And check the sender: replies go out from the mailbox attached to the campaign — not necessarily from your personal one.

Not at the top. Draw a line:

1. Archive everything older than four weeks. Anything that has been lying that long is either dealt with or lost — reading it now changes neither.
2. Filter the rest by “Known” and work through it. Those are the replies from contacts, and that is where the value lies.
3. Look through “Unknown” and fish out the enquiries.
4. Then introduce the routine that stops it getting this far again: twice a day, deal with every message completely.

Drawing the line in point 1 hurts and is still right. An inbox you avoid out of a guilty conscience will never be used again.

Only what is needed for matching, and only from the folders and the period you selected when connecting.

So that you know:

• Not your entire mailbox. You decide on the folders.
• A limited period. By default a few months, not years.
• Attachments are not carried over permanently.

Why the limit: a complete mailbox going back ten years is a second copy of all your correspondence — with all the personal data it contains. Nobody needs that to match campaign replies.

If you are unsure what has been read in, look in the mailbox settings. They show which folders and which period apply.

Step by step:

1. Is a mailbox connected? Without a connection, there is no inbox.
2. Is the sync running? On some instances it does not run by itself — then there is a “Sync now” button.
3. Are the right folders selected? If only “Inbox” is read in but your replies land in a subfolder, nothing arrives here.
4. Filter set? “Unread” shows nothing if everything has been read.
5. Period. Anything older than the configured period is not fetched.

The most common case is number 3: a rule in the email program that automatically moves replies into a folder before Aurora Hive Sales sees them.

There are three typical causes:

• Two mailboxes fetching the same address — a personal one and a shared one, for example.
• A forwarding rule copying messages into a second folder that is read in.
• A contact with two email addresses to which the same message went.

What you do: check which mailboxes are connected and which folders are read in for each. In the vast majority of cases, there is an overlap there.

Duplicate entries are annoying but harmless: they do not lead to duplicate sending. That arises somewhere else — with duplicate contacts.

First, bear in mind that a connected mailbox means: colleagues with the corresponding rights can read whatever has been read in there.

It follows that:

• Connect personal mailboxes only if that is intended — and the team should know that this is the case.
• Choose folders deliberately. What is not read in is not visible.
• Confidential matters do not belong in notes. The content of a message can be requested as part of a subject access request.

For specially protected data — health, job applications, social data — the following also applies: processing requires its own legal basis, and the group of people with access should be as small as possible.