Mailbox

Much of the paperwork of investment operations still arrives by email: NAV packs from the fund administrator, holdings and transactions from the custodian, confirmations and statements from brokers. The Mailbox gives each workspace an email address of its own to receive them. Whoever has the address can send emails and attachments to the workspace. SPARK keeps what arrives for 7 days and shows it in the Mailbox's Inbox, and a workflow or an agent saves the emails you want to keep as records, and their attachments as files.

The Mailbox only receives. It never sends, replies or forwards, and it is no one's personal inbox. To work with a person's own Outlook or Gmail mailbox, connect it instead; see Email ingestion.

Open the Mailbox page

1. In the left sidebar, open the Settings tab.
2. Under Extensions, select Mailbox.

The page reads Collect and store emails directly in your workspace with a unique inbox.

Switch it on

While the Mailbox is off, the page shows The Mailbox is off for this workspace and an Activate button. Click Activate. The workspace gets its address at once, and SPARK offers to set up the workflow that keeps its emails (see Keep the emails). Click Skip for now to do that later.

If the page says The Mailbox isn't available in this environment. Contact support to enable it., your deployment does not receive email; ask NGT's support team.

The address

The address is made of the workspace's name, the organisation's name and ten random characters, in lower case, on SPARK's mail domain. For the NAV Oversight workspace of Kestrel Capital, for example:

nav-oversight.kestrel-capital.k7m2x9qp4t@inbox.nextgatetech.com

The names show whose address it is; the random characters keep anyone from guessing it from the names alone. The address is fixed when the Mailbox is first switched on, so renaming the workspace or the organisation later leaves it as it is. Senders can write it in upper or lower case.

Give the address to whoever should send to the workspace: the fund administrator, the custodian, a colleague, or a distribution list. If it reaches someone it should not, give the workspace a new one with Rotate address.

The Settings tab

Once it is on, the page has two tabs, Settings and Inbox, and opens on Settings:

• Address: the workspace's address, read-only. The copy button beside it, Copy address, puts it on your clipboard.
• Approved senders: Addresses or domains, one per line. Emails from anyone else are not kept. Empty: anyone who has the address. Write nav@fabrikam.com for one sender, or fabrikam.com for everyone at that domain. A change raises the You have unsaved changes bar: click Save changes, or Discard.
• Retention: Emails are kept for 7 days, then deleted. Its link, save them with a workflow, sets up the workflow that keeps them.
• Limit: The most emails it takes in a day. The Mailbox takes up to 1,000 a day; past that, senders are asked to try again later. Contact support to raise it.

An approved sender counts only when its own mail server proves the email came from it, so writing a trusted address in the From line is not enough to get an email kept. An email to an address that is off, or one that was rotated away, is refused while it is being delivered, so the sender's own mail server tells them it did not arrive. Spam and emails carrying a virus are refused the same way. Each email can be up to 40 MB.

The Inbox tab

Inbox lists the emails the Mailbox received in the last 7 days, newest first, ten at a time: Load older emails adds ten more. Each row shows who sent the email, when, and its subject, with a paperclip when it has attachments. Click one to read it on the right: its subject, then From, To, Cc when it has one, Date, Attachments with their sizes, Size and Message ID, and the Message itself.

The Inbox looks for new emails only when you click Refresh, the button at the right of the tabs.

The Inbox is for reading. It names an email's attachments but does not open them: to work with the files, keep the emails in the workspace, as below.

Keep the emails

The Mailbox deletes each email 7 days after it arrived. To keep emails for good, SPARK sets up a workflow that saves them in the workspace:

1. Click Create workflow in the page header, or save them with a workflow on the Retention row. The same offer opens right after Activate.
2. The Keep the Mailbox's emails dialog says what the workflow does: each email becomes a record in Email Ingestion, its attachments go to Files with the Mailbox label, and emails it already saved are skipped.
3. Click Create workflow. Workflow created confirms it; click View workflow to open it, or Done to stay on the Mailbox.

The workflow is called Save emails sent to the Mailbox. It has two steps, a Schedule Trigger and a Save Emails step reading this workspace's Mailbox, and it is created as a draft, so it runs only once you:

1. Open it and click Activate.
2. Give it a schedule in Workflows › Schedulers › New, for example every weekday at 18:00. See Scheduling.

Each run saves the emails it has not saved before. Their records go to the Emails - Mailbox data object in the Email Ingestion group, which the first run creates, and each attachment goes to Files labelled Mailbox, linked to its email. To save only some emails, by sender, subject or date, change the Save Emails step's settings; see Email ingestion.

Ask an agent

Agents can read the Mailbox and save its emails too, with two of Spark's tools: Spark Read Mailbox Emails and Spark Save Mailbox Emails. The built-in agents have them; give them to an agent you made in its Tools section. Ask in a thread, for example What did Fabrikam send to the Mailbox today?, or Save the NAV packs Fabrikam sent this week. An agent acts with the permissions of the person who asks: reading the Mailbox needs a role that can view Integrations, and saving its emails one that can create records and files. An agent reads what an email says as content, never as instructions to follow.

Rotate the address

To retire the address, for example after it was shared too widely, open the header's ⋯ and choose Rotate address. Rotate the address? explains that the current address is decommissioned and a new one is created; within a minute the old address stops taking email, so share the new one with everyone who sends to the Mailbox. Click Create new and decommission old.

Emails already received stay in the Inbox, and the workflow keeps saving to the same data object.

Deactivate the Mailbox

Open the header's ⋯ and choose Deactivate, then confirm in Deactivate the Mailbox?. Within a minute its address stops taking email, until it is on again. Its address and the emails it received are kept, so Activate brings back the same address.

Who can use it

• Everyone in the workspace can open the Mailbox page, copy its address and read its Inbox.
• Switching it on or off, rotating its address and changing its approved senders need the Editor or Administrator role.
• Creating the workflow needs a role that can create workflows.

See Teams & roles.

Where to go next

• Save emails from Microsoft 365 or Gmail as well: Email ingestion
• Start a workflow when a saved attachment lands in Files: File-triggered workflows
• Receive files over SFTP instead: Managed SFTP
• Let agents search the web: Web Search