Per-property mailboxes

You can run an entire portfolio through one intake address, and plenty of companies do. You can also give every building its own, so that the address a vendor used already tells inletAP which property the invoice belongs to.

This page walks you through creating one and proving it works. It ends with the routing rules, so that you know what the address decides and what it does not.

Before you start

• You need to be an Admin. Adding an intake mailbox is an Admin-only action. Every other role sees the whole list and a greyed New mailbox button with the reason printed beside it, which is deliberate: an AP specialist should be able to see what to ask for.
• Check your plan. The Free plan includes one mailbox — the one your workspace was issued at sign-up — and a second one needs a paid plan. You are told which plan you are on and what it includes when the creation is refused.
• Create the building first. The Routes to field offers the properties already in your workspace, so a building that is not on Properties yet cannot be chosen. You can add the mailbox now and the property later, but then nothing points them at each other.
• Decide the address before you press anything. A mailbox cannot be renamed and cannot be deleted. There is no delete route in the product at all, so read the address back to yourself before you create it.

1. Decide whether this building needs its own address

The question is not how many buildings you have. It is where the routing information lives.

Give a building its own address when the address a vendor used already answers the question — each building has its own vendors and its own published address, or a joint venture's books must not mix with anybody else's, or an outside bookkeeper handles two of your buildings and nothing else.

Stay on one catch-all when vendors email a central AP address and the invoice itself names the building. The aliases on each building's page match the name off the invoice whichever address it arrived at, and a list of aliases is less to maintain than fifty forwards at your mail provider — fifty things that can be silently switched off. The honest test: if you cannot say which forward would break first, you have too many.

2. Open the Mailboxes tab and press New mailbox

Go to Settings → Mailboxes. The card is headed Inbound mailboxes with the number you have configured beside it, and New mailbox is at the top right.

3. Type the address, the label and what it routes to

The dialog is called New inbound mailbox and has three fields.

Address is only the part before the @; the subdomain is fixed and printed beside the box. Use lower case letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores, starting and ending with a letter or a number. The dialog will not accept a plus sign, and the next section explains why that is no loss.

Label is for your own benefit and is required — the Create button stays disabled until you type one. It is what the list shows under the address, so "Lakeshore intake" beats "mailbox 2".

Routes to is the field that does the work. Choose the building, and invoices arriving at this address are coded to that property when the invoice itself names none your aliases recognize. Leaving it on All properties creates a plain intake address with no property behind it.

4. Create the mailbox

Press Create mailbox. The toast says the address is ready to receive mail, and it means it: these addresses live on a subdomain inletAP controls, so there is no DNS record to add and nothing to wait for.

If the address is already in use anywhere on your subdomain, the dialog tells you so and nothing is created.

You should now be looking at the mailbox list with your new address in it, showing 0 msgs since it was created, and under it the label and the property you chose.

5. Check it actually routes

Three checks, in the order they are worth doing.

1. Copy the address from the list with the Copy button rather than retyping it. A mailbox that takes no mail is usually a typo in a forwarding rule somewhere else.
2. Send it an invoice that names no property — or forward one from the building. Open Inbox and open the document when it arrives. The property should be the one you chose, with no rule involved.
3. Read the audit trail. Creating a mailbox writes a mailbox.created event to the Audit Log with your name against it, the address, the label and the property. Inbound routing is a decision about which invoices reach your workspace, so it is recorded like one.

The message count on the list row is a lifetime total, not a rolling window, and the date beside it is the last message that arrived.

How routing is then decided

A mailbox with a property is a fallback, not an override:

The invoice wins because a vendor who sends a Maple Street invoice to the Lakeshore address has made an addressing mistake, not a coding decision. The mailbox fills a gap; it does not argue with the page.

Rules can read the mailbox directly. Intake mailbox is a rule field, so "if the intake mailbox contains lakeshore@, code to 6120 and assign Priya" is a rule you can write. Use contains with the local part rather than your whole intake subdomain. Reach for the rule when the address should also set a GL code, assign a reviewer, or apply to only some of the mail arriving there — see your first coding rule.

Plus addressing does not create a mailbox

An address such as ap+lakeshore@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com is delivered to ap@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com. Inbound mail is resolved by address: the exact address is tried first, and if nothing matches, the +tag is stripped and the base address is tried. So the mail lands in the base mailbox, and no new mailbox appears.

This is normal mail behavior rather than a decision of ours, and it is worth knowing before you hand out forty tagged addresses expecting forty routes. If the tag should mean something, create the mailbox or write a rule.

Forwarding into a per-property mailbox

If you already publish per-building addresses on your own domain, forward each one to its inletAP counterpart:

lakeshore@yourcompany.com  ->  lakeshore@yourcompany.inlet-ap.com

inletAP cannot receive mail addressed to a domain you own, so this is the route in. Forwarding your existing mailbox covers the setup and the confirmation step both Google and Microsoft require.

One caution about rules in this arrangement. Forwarding at your provider usually preserves the original sender, so rules on Source email keep working. A person pressing Forward by hand does not: the message then comes from your colleague, and a sender rule written for the vendor will not match it.

Housekeeping

A mailbox per property is a small standing commitment, and two habits keep it honest.

Review the last-arrival dates once a quarter. A property that changed managing agent, or a forward that expired when somebody left, shows up as a mailbox whose last message is months old while its building is still sending you bills through somebody else's address.

Keep the mailbox property and the aliases in agreement. They are two statements about the same building, and a building that has moved between entities is the usual reason they drift apart. Aliases are the better investment of the two: "Lakeshore", "Lakeshore Ct" and "123 Lake Shore Drive" all resolving to one property helps every invoice, including the ones that arrive at the catch-all.

Nothing has to be retired, and nothing can be: a mailbox, once created, keeps accepting mail. That is the right default here. A vendor will use last year's address next spring, and a mailbox that still exists is a message that arrives rather than one that bounces back to a vendor who then telephones your office.

Where to go next

• Intake addresses — how your subdomain and first mailbox are issued.
• Forwarding your existing mailbox — bringing your published addresses in.
• Your first coding rule — refining what a mailbox routed.
• Plans and limits — how many mailboxes each plan includes.