✉Mailboxes and inbox

Without a connected mailbox, Aurora Hive Sales sends and receives nothing. No test send, no campaign, no contract for signature.

Once connected, it syncs in both directions: whatever arrives in the mailbox appears in Aurora Hive Sales, and whatever you do in Aurora Hive Sales (mark as read, move, put away) also happens in the mailbox.

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With “Connect an email mailbox”. You enter your address, nothing else.

Aurora Hive Sales works out by itself which provider the mailbox is with and how signing in works there. You only see server names and ports if this cannot be derived — then a selection field with the common providers takes you further, and for everything else you enter your provider’s details yourself.

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You sign in once there and confirm the access. Aurora Hive Sales never gets to see your password in the process — it only passes between you and your provider.

What Aurora Hive Sales receives is a revocable authorisation. You can withdraw it at any time in your provider account; syncing then stops, without anything being deleted in Aurora Hive Sales.

For all except those with their own sign-in, the mailbox password is used. Aurora Hive Sales stores it encrypted and never displays it again.

If two-factor authentication is switched on for your account, the normal password does not work; you need an app password. You create this in the security settings of your mail provider — it is a separate, long password just for this one program and can be withdrawn individually.

• IMAP is the incoming mail server — Aurora Hive Sales reads through it. It is listed in your provider’s setup instructions.
• SMTP is the outgoing mail server. Without it, Aurora Hive Sales can read but not send.
• The port must match the encryption: 993 belongs to SSL, 143 to STARTTLS.

You only see these fields if Aurora Hive Sales does not recognise the provider by itself. Most providers require the full email address as the user name; some require a customer number instead.

You choose both at the end of the setup. The defaults are deliberately cautious:

• Spam, trash and drafts are not preselected. There is nothing in them that belongs in a CRM.
• Three months is the default, because reading in a mailbox that has grown over years takes time — and because the question almost always concerns the last few weeks.

Both can be changed later; with “Read folders again” Aurora Hive Sales fetches the selected scope once more.

You control this with three tick boxes:

• “Only store messages from and to known contacts” — everything else is read but not filed. This keeps Aurora Hive Sales a CRM, keeps the amount of data small and is at the same time the data-minimising setting.
• “Store attachments as well” — without this tick you see that a message had attachments, but the files stay in the mailbox. A mailbox with attachments can easily take up several gigabytes.
• Two-way sync — without this tick, syncing remains a one-way street.

If you are unsure: the most data-minimising setting is also the one with which the least can go wrong.

Yes, if two-way sync is switched on: read, moved, put away — the same happens in the mailbox.

Without this tick, syncing remains a one-way street: Aurora Hive Sales reads along but does not intervene. That is the right setting if several people use the same mailbox and you do not want to put anyone’s messages away without asking.

Syncing runs in the background at a fixed interval and fetches new messages from the selected folders. The current interval of your instance is shown on the mailbox page.

This means: a reply does not appear in Aurora Hive Sales in the same second it arrives in the mailbox. If you are waiting for something, a look in the mailbox is quicker than reloading Aurora Hive Sales.

The status indicator on the mailbox page tells you. That is exactly what it is there for: an expired password is noticed immediately, not only when no reply has been matched for weeks.

The most common causes:

• Password changed — changed at the provider, not updated in Aurora Hive Sales.
• Two-factor authentication switched on later — now an app password is needed.
• Authorisation withdrawn — withdrawn in the Microsoft or Google account.
• Mailbox full — some providers then refuse access.

Switched off, the mailbox and Aurora Hive Sales stay separate without the credentials being lost — that is the right way for a pause.

Removed, Aurora Hive Sales no longer syncs the mailbox and no longer sends through it. The mailbox itself remains unchanged at your provider — nothing is deleted.

Messages already matched stay in the contact histories.

Replies to your campaigns. Aurora Hive Sales matches them to a contact by sender address and subject; anything that cannot be matched is listed under “New” and waits for you.

The sidebar splits this up:

• Unread — messages nobody has opened yet.
• New — senders for whom there is no contact yet. You can create one from here.
• Known — unread messages from people who are already in your address book. Usually the most important replies.

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That happens with shared mailboxes — for example when several contact persons write via an info address. The match can be corrected on the item itself.

Prevention helps more than correction: if the same shared address is in the address book for several people, Aurora Hive Sales cannot match the reply unambiguously. A separate contact for the shared address, and personal addresses for the individual people — that solves it for good.

Then the message is listed under “New” — senders for whom there is no contact yet. You can create one directly from there; address and name are taken over.

That is the quickest way to let an address book grow out of ongoing work instead of maintaining it afterwards.

Yes. Each campaign chooses its sender mailbox when it is created; it determines the sender name, signature and reply address.

That is the usual set-up when several people send with their own addresses — or when you want to separate one address for first contact from one for existing customers. The display name per mailbox is the name recipients see in front of the address; the internal label next to it is only for you.

One that belongs to you, is read and is on your own domain.

In concrete terms: no free-mail address (you cannot set your own DNS records there), and no address nobody looks into — because that is where the replies arrive.

For a team, a shared address such as contact@ is often a better choice than a personal one: it survives holidays and staff changes.

Above all the two-way sync: if you mark a message as read or put it away in Aurora Hive Sales, the same happens in the mailbox — and everyone else who works there sees it too.

For a mailbox several people look into, the one-way street is therefore often the friendlier setting: Aurora Hive Sales reads along but does not intervene.

Because reading in a mailbox that has grown over years takes time — depending on the size, a very long time — and because in practice the question almost always concerns the last few weeks.

You can change the period and fetch it again with “Read folders again”. Expect two things: it takes a while, and the amount of data grows noticeably — especially if attachments are stored as well.

That depends almost entirely on one setting: a mailbox with attachments can easily take up several gigabytes.

Without the tick for attachments, you see that a message had attachments, but the files stay in the mailbox — that is usually the right choice. The text of the messages themselves hardly matters.

If disk space becomes scarce in the system status, this is the first thing to check.

Work through the sidebar from bottom to top:

1. Known first — unread messages from people who are already in the address book. These are usually the most important replies.
2. New next — senders without a contact. Whoever is relevant becomes a contact directly from there.
3. Unread for the rest.

Whatever you put away in Aurora Hive Sales is also gone from the mailbox with two-way sync — which is practical as long as you are the only one working with it.

That is the usual side effect of a campaign, and in a way a good sign: the emails are arriving.

Only one thing matters: an out-of-office reply is not a reply in terms of content. If Aurora Hive Sales counts it as a reply, the recipient drops out of the follow-up even though they never read the email. So look through the replies after a campaign before you start the next stage.

Technically yes — in practice it is a trap. Two systems syncing the same mailbox interfere with each other’s processing state: whatever one marks as read or puts away, the other sees.

It becomes particularly awkward between a test and a production environment: a test run can then shift the state of the real operation without anyone noticing.

So connect a mailbox in exactly one place, and use a separate address for tests.

In two ways, depending on how it is connected:

• When signed in via the provider: withdraw the authorisation granted in your Microsoft or Google account. This takes effect immediately and independently of Aurora Hive Sales.
• With password access: remove the mailbox in Aurora Hive Sales or change the password at the provider.

In both cases the mailbox remains unchanged at the provider, and messages already matched stay in the contact histories.