Reply and post by email

Every space has an email address

Each discussion space shows a copy-able email address, for example acme.finance-committee@reply.boardtools.io. The part before the dot is your board, and the part after it is the space — so the address always points at exactly one space's audience.

You will see it at the top of a space and on each thread, with a Copy button next to it. Copy it to save it in your contacts or share it with the group.

Replying from your inbox

When email notifications for discussions are turned on, each new post is emailed to the space's audience. You can reply straight from your email program — just hit reply and send — and your message is added to the thread as a post, exactly as if you had typed it on the web. It shows up under your name, everyone else in the space is notified as usual, and the post is marked as having arrived by email.

Quoted history and signatures are trimmed automatically so the thread stays readable: what appears in the thread is what you typed above the quoted message, not the whole chain underneath it. Write your reply above the quoted text (which is what every mail program does by default) and it will come through in full.

Attachments on a reply are included, up to a combined 30 MB per message, and must be one of the ordinary board-document formats — PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, CSV, or an image — the same allow-list the web composer offers (see Attaching a file to a post). Accepted attachments appear under the post in the thread, each one a link showing the file's name and size, and anyone who can see the thread can download them — nobody else, exactly like the posts themselves.

If your attachment(s) go over that 30 MB limit, or one of them is a file type BoardTools doesn't accept, your reply still posts — with a note explaining which happened — and we email you back to let you know. You can then either resend with a smaller or supported file, or open the thread and attach it to a reply on the web.

A reply usually appears within a minute or two. If you replied and nothing showed up, check the list below — and remember you can always post the same thing on the web.

Emailing a file in versus attaching it on the web

The two routes share the same 30 MB per post budget and, since this change, the same allow-listed formats — a .zip refused by the composer on screen is refused the same way when emailed in, because it is checked against the identical allow-list the document library applies to a web upload. That keeps anything a browser might try to run (a web page, a script) out of a file the board will later open, whichever way it arrived.

One difference remains, and it only matters for a very large single file: on the web, each file is also capped at 25 MB on its own (the composer's per-file limit, inside the same 30 MB-per-post budget). By email, there is no separate per-file cap — a single attachment can use the whole 30 MB budget, as long as it is one of the accepted formats.

Files are only ever handed back as downloads — BoardTools never opens or renders an attachment in your browser — and a download is always checked against your membership of the space first.

Your reply address is personal to you

Every notification we send you replies to a private address that looks like reply+a1b2c3…@reply.boardtools.io. It stands for you, in that one thread, which is how your reply is filed under your name and in the right place — no matter which device or mail account you send it from.

Because it stands for you, treat it like any other link in a BoardTools email:

• Don't forward a notification to someone outside the thread if you'd rather they didn't post as you. If a colleague should be in the conversation, add them to the space instead.
• The address keeps working for the life of the notification (up to 90 days), so replying to an older email in a thread is fine — and you can reply more than once.
• It stops working as soon as you leave the board, and replies are always re-checked against your current membership, so a reply never posts on behalf of someone who is no longer a member.

Starting a thread by email

(Not live yet.) You will also be able to start a new thread by emailing the space's address directly: the email's subject becomes the thread title and the body becomes the first post — handy for forwarding something relevant into the right space without opening the app.

When email won't post

A few messages are deliberately not turned into posts. For some of them you'll get a short email back explaining why, with a link to finish on the web; for the rest, nothing is sent back at all — on purpose.

You'll get an email back for these, because we already know who you are and which thread the reply was headed to:

• Empty replies. If your message is only quoted history — nothing typed above it — there is nothing to post.
• Mail to a locked thread or an archived space (it is read-only).

Nothing is sent back for these. Replying to a message we can't already verify is how spam bounces end up hitting innocent people, so we never do that:

• Automatic messages such as out-of-office replies and bulk mailings. These are dropped silently and never answered, so a holiday auto-reply can't bounce back and forth with the board's notifications.
• Mail sent to a reply address that has expired (older than 90 days) or that belonged to someone who has since left the board.
• Replies where your reply address was stripped by a mail program or forwarder, if we also cannot recognise the original message it was answering, or if we cannot verify that the mail really came from your email domain. We never take a sender's word for who they are — an unverifiable reply is dropped rather than posted under someone's name.

If a reply doesn't appear, nothing is lost: post it on the web instead.

Choosing how much email you get

Inside a space you can set how much you want emailed to you — every post, just the first post of each thread, a daily digest, or nothing at all. Muting a space never removes you from it; you can always read and post on the web.