Zendesk Has A New Free App That Can Solve All The Problems With Alias Emails

Most companies use email aliases in one form or another.

For example, at Business Insider, if you write an email to sales@businessinsider.com, you can reach all sales members. If you write to sai@businessinsider.com, all tech writers would receive your email.

It's a pretty convenient way to reach a group of people at once. But if you're on the receiving end, it could often lead to chaos.

What usually happens is, once an email comes through an alias, someone replies to all team members, asking who should respond to the original email. And then a bunch of emails would go back and forth within that email thread, until it gets so cluttered that you lose track of the entire workflow.

This problem is so common that Zendesk, a cloud-based customer service software, has developed an app specifically designed to make it easier to manage alias emails.

It's an app called Inbox, and you can test it out immediately by signing up for it here.

You can set up multiple accounts to forward all your team's alias emails into this single app. Within the app, you can invite and assign emails to another team member, add a note or use an "@" mention to notify a certain user, and "follow" specific conversations you want to see through. You can directly respond to the original email within the app, too. Everything is recorded in a conversational way, which makes it easy to follow.

"Inbox helps the internal team to respond to those emails (that come through aliases) in a way that works really well as a team," Amanda Kleha, Zendesk's general manager of the Online Business unit, told Business Insider. "It creates a simple way for teams to work together on email."

Inbox is a free, standalone app, which means you won't need a Zendesk membership to try it out. But Zendesk said Inbox is still an experimental product, so it's only available as a beta version for now.

You can see the screenshot of the app below. The left-side column shows a list of emails that came through an alias. The right-side column has a list of internal comments that are made in response to the email titled, "Checking in on logo concepts." Everything is in real time and you can link as many aliases as you want in a single Inbox.