Skip to main content
All CollectionsIntegrationsEmail & Calendar
Public Email Account Usage
Public Email Account Usage

The power of public email accounts and how to set them up in Planhat

Christian Dreyer avatar
Written by Christian Dreyer
Updated over a month ago

The email address of any team member in Planhat can be made public, which allows colleagues to email on behalf of each other.  

Use cases

As well as enabling this for the email address of a specific named User, a common use case of public emails is a simple ticketing system using a shared mailbox. You can create Planhat Users that represent teams, such as success@company.com. All clients (or clients within a certain segment, such as SMB) can email this public email address, and your CS reps can respond from the public email address. These clients do not get a dedicated rep, but they will still feel they are being well looked after by your company.

Other great use cases for public emails are to represent non-CS functions. For example:

How to enable this feature

Note that this is a per-User setting, so needs to be enabled individually by each User (an individual or a shared account User) rather than being something that can be configured in bulk by a Planhat admin.

Pre-requisite steps

  1. The permission "Email on my behalf" needs to be enabled for the Role that the User has.

    • This is part of the "Workflow permissions - features" section of Role settings

    • You may need to speak to a Planhat admin within your organization to ask them to enable this for you

    • The permission itself doesn't automatically enable a User's email address to be available for others to send from, but it enables this feature to be turned on

      Click the image to view it enlarged

  2. Each individual Planhat User (either a personal User or a shared User) needs to enable their email (Google or Outlook) sync before they can share their email account. This is because without sync enabled, we would not have access to your email account, so no emails would be able to be sent on your behalf. To connect your email account to Planhat:

    1. Log in as the User in question

    2. Put your mouse over your avatar (initial or picture in the bottom left), and click on "Your Profile" at the top

    3. Click on the "EMAIL" tab

    4. Click on the "Enable Google Account Access" or "Enable Outlook Account Access" button. (Only one button will show, corresponding to how your Planhat tenant is configured)

      or

    5. Select the appropriate folders to sync, as shown in our separate article here

Main instructions

  1. Log in as the User in question (which could be your personal User or a shared account as described above)

  2. Put your mouse over the avatar (initial or picture in the bottom left), and at the very top, click on "Your Profile"

  3. Click on the "EMAIL" tab

  4. Scroll down to the "PUBLIC ACCOUNT USAGE" section and flip the toggle switch from "No" to "Yes"

    📌 Important to note: If you don't see this toggle switch, check the "Email on my behalf" workflow feature permission in the "Role" you're assigned to in your Planhat tenant - it needs to be turned on, as we described in the pre-requisite steps above

How to use a shared email account

In order to respond from a public account, when replying to an email just change the "From" field using the drop-down list to the account you want to respond from.

As with all emails in Planhat, to reply from a public account the public account's email address must already be in the email chain. If it's not currently in the email chain, you can forward the email to the public address and then reply from there.

You can also create a new email and select a shared email address to send from.

Important notes

  • If a Planhat User has "Public account usage" enabled, then any other Planhat Users in your tenant will be able to send from that email address to your clients. It is important to think through whether/when this should be enabled. We recommend that you create an internal policy around usage.

  • If you go to edit a scheduled email that's due to be sent from a User who does not have "Public account usage" enabled, then the sender will be changed, as that person is not available for you to have selected in the "From" field. By default it will change to the first option in the "From" list, which is typically Account Owner.

Did this answer your question?