Frequently asked questions

Could I miss a customer email if Gmail thinks it's spam?

Possibly, yes, and we want to be upfront about it.

Gmail runs its spam classifier before the filter you set up to forward mail to InboxDesk. If Gmail decides an incoming email looks like spam (and it sometimes does that to hostile or escalated customer emails, which are exactly the ones you most want to see), the email gets routed to your Spam folder. Your forwarding filter never sees it. InboxDesk never sees it either.

The mitigation we instruct during onboarding

When you create your forwarding filter in Gmail, tick the box labelled "Never send it to Spam". That option overrides Gmail's spam classifier for anything matching the filter criterion, which closes the gap for emails arriving through that filter. The onboarding instructions on your dashboard walk through this step explicitly.

A belt-and-braces habit

Glance at your Gmail Spam folder every couple of weeks for anything from a customer-shaped sender. If you find one, click Not spam on it. Gmail learns from that signal over time and gets less aggressive about classifying similar mail.

Why don't we fix this structurally?

The clean fix is to read mail directly from Gmail via OAuth rather than going through a forwarding filter, which dodges Gmail's pre-filter spam classifier entirely. That route requires an annual security audit (Google's CASA review, $15,000 to $75,000 a year), which doesn't fit our cost model at launch. We'll add it as a premium-tier upgrade once revenue justifies the audit fee. The "Never send to Spam" filter does the job for the vast majority of cases until then.