Email — Gmail, Outlook
Email is still the highest-volume channel for most support teams. Omniflow connects to Gmail and Outlook (Microsoft 365) directly via OAuth, so customer emails land in the inbox and your replies go out from your real domain.
What you get
- Inbound — every reply to your support address lands in the inbox as a conversation.
- Outbound — replies go from the connected mailbox; the customer sees
support@yourcompany.com, notnoreply@omniflow. - Threading — replies stay in the same email thread on the customer’s side.
- Attachments — both directions, up to provider size limits.
Connect Gmail
Open Integrations
Settings → Integrations → Gmail → Connect.
Pick the mailbox
- For shared inboxes, use a Google Workspace shared mailbox or an alias group.
- For per-agent inboxes, each agent connects their own.
Authorize
OAuth consent screen — Omniflow requests gmail.readonly, gmail.send, and gmail.modify (to mark messages read).
Pick scope
| Scope | When |
|---|---|
| All inbox messages | The whole mailbox flows in. |
| Labeled messages only | Only emails matching a Gmail label (e.g. Customer-support). Keeps internal threads out of Omniflow. |
Choose default agent / team
Inbound emails route here unless a routing rule overrides.
Save
Connect Outlook (Microsoft 365)
The flow is essentially the same — connect, pick mailbox, authorize, scope. Outlook supports both shared mailboxes and Office 365 distribution groups.
| Outlook quirk | Notes |
|---|---|
| Shared mailbox auth | Connect with a user that has full access to the shared mailbox. |
| Conditional access | If your tenant requires CA, the integration user must satisfy the policy. |
| Send-as | Make sure the user has Send-as permission on the shared mailbox. |
Threading and reply hygiene
- Omniflow preserves the original
Message-Idand adds standardIn-Reply-Toheaders, so the customer’s email client threads correctly. - Quoted history is collapsed by default; agents can expand it inline.
- Image inlines are preserved both directions.
- Auto-responders (vacation replies), bounces and bulk mail are kept out of the inbox by the inbound rules below.
Reply-from-anywhere — agents can reply from the inbox, and the email goes out from the connected mailbox. They don’t need to alt-tab to Gmail.
Templates and signatures
Most teams pair the email integration with email templates and per-agent signatures. Templates fill placeholders from the contact, conversation, and CRM record; signatures append automatically.
Inbound rules and suspended mail
Not everything that lands in a mailbox should become a conversation. When you connect a mailbox — and later under Settings › Channels › Email › the mailbox — you choose what stays out:
| Switch | Default | What it catches |
|---|---|---|
| Newsletters and notifications | on | Mail flagged as bulk or list traffic: Jira, GitHub, marketing digests |
| Out-of-office and auto-replies | on | Automatic replies that never need an answer |
| Delivery failures | on | Bounces from mail servers |
| Mail from this mailbox to itself | on | Calendar acceptances and notes the address sends to itself |
| Senders not yet in your contacts | off | Strict mode: only known contacts reach the inbox |
Mail already in the mailbox. A new connection imports only mail received from the moment you connect. Choose Import unread mail already in the mailbox if you want the backlog too.
Block and allow list. Workspace-wide, next to the switches. Enter a full
address or a domain (@newsletter.com). A blocked sender is suspended
(recoverable) or dropped; an allowed sender always reaches the inbox, whatever
the switches say. Mark as spam and block sender on a conversation adds the
sender for you.
The Suspended view. Everything the rules held back sits in the inbox’s Suspended view with the reason on each row. Recover it (the conversation appears after the next mailbox sync), delete it, or block the sender. Rows expire after 14 days.
Bounce and abuse handling
Bounces are handled by the mailbox you connect, not by Omniflow. Gmail and Outlook return their own delivery failures and non-delivery reports to the sending mailbox, and that is where you read a bounce reason.
Omniflow does not track bounces per contact, does not count hard bounces, and does not suppress sending to an address that has bounced. If you need suppression, manage it in the sending provider or in whatever list tooling owns the address.
A high bounce rate hurts deliverability. If you import a contact list with many bad addresses, throttle sending or run validation first — repeated bounces can land your domain on a blocklist.
DKIM, SPF, DMARC
Sending through Gmail / Outlook means your domain’s existing DKIM, SPF, and DMARC apply. No extra DNS work needed for those providers. If you switch to a different sender (e.g. SendGrid for marketing), set up alignment so customers don’t see “via” warnings.
Open in Omniflow
Related
| If you want to… | Go to |
|---|---|
| Build email templates | Canned Responses & Templates |
| Keep newsletters, notifications or a sender out of the inbox | Inbound rules on this page |
| Set SLA on email | SLA & Business Hours |