# Email forwarding (support inbox to feedback)

Every Usero project gets its own inbound email address, something like `acme-x7k2@in.usero.io`. Point a forwarding rule from your
support inbox at that address and every forwarded email becomes a feedback item in your inbox, with the sender's email attached.
From there it runs through the same AI clustering and triage as feedback from the widget, Slack, or your forms, and a clustered
report can become a GitHub pull request the same way any feedback can.

## What it does

- **One address per project.** Your address is unique to the project (the local part is a slug derived from your project name
  plus a random suffix), so mail sent to it can only land in that project. Mail to an address that matches no project is
  dropped, never bounced into someone else's inbox.
- **Subject and body become the feedback.** The subject line and the plain-text body are combined into the feedback comment, so
  a one-line subject with an empty body still lands as a usable item.
- **The sender is attributed.** The `From` address is parsed out of the header (`Jane <jane@example.com>` becomes
  `jane@example.com`) and stored as the feedback's user email, so you know who reported it and clustering can connect their
  other reports.
- **Deduped by Message-Id.** Each email carries an RFC 5322 `Message-Id` header, and Usero uses it as the dedup key. If your
  provider retries a delivery or a rule forwards the same email twice, you get one feedback item, not two.
- **Same pipeline as everything else.** An emailed report is feedback like any other: it is classified, clustered with duplicate
  reports from other sources, and can feed a pull request.

## Prerequisites

- A Usero account and a project.
- Access to the support inbox you want to forward from (or an admin who can add a forwarding rule for it). Gmail, Google
  Workspace, and Outlook all work; anything that can forward email works.

## Set up forwarding

1. Open your project, then go to **Integrations** (the URL is `usero.io/YOUR_CLIENT_ID/integrations`). To open your own
   integrations page, [go here](/integrations). Find the **Email forwarding** card: your inbound address is shown there, with a
   copy button. It is also in **Settings** under Email forwarding.
2. In your email provider, create a forwarding rule from the address customers write to (e.g. `support@yourcompany.com`) to your
   Usero address:
   - **Gmail / Google Workspace:** Settings, then **Forwarding and POP/IMAP**, then **Add a forwarding address**. To forward
     only some mail (say, everything to a support alias), use a filter with the "Forward it to" action instead of forwarding
     everything.
   - **Outlook / Microsoft 365:** Settings, then **Mail**, then **Forwarding**, and add the address. Admins can also set up a
     mail flow rule that redirects a shared mailbox.
3. Confirm the provider's verification email. Gmail in particular sends a confirmation code to the forwarding address before it
   will forward anything. That verification email lands in your Usero inbox as a feedback item, so open your feedback inbox,
   find the item from Google, and copy the confirmation code out of it back into Gmail.
4. Send a test email to your support address (or straight to the Usero address). It should appear in your feedback inbox within
   a minute, with your sending address attributed as the user.

## What lands in Usero

Each forwarded email becomes one feedback item with `email` as the source. The item carries the composed subject and body as the
comment, the sender's parsed email address as the user, and metadata recording the raw `From` header, the subject, the address
it was sent to, and the `Message-Id`. It clusters alongside widget, Slack, Discord, form, and app-review feedback in the same
inbox, and with a GitHub repo connected you can open a PR from it or from the cluster it joins.

## Limits (v1)

- **No attachments.** Only the plain-text content of the email is ingested. Screenshots or files attached to a forwarded email
  are not stored.
- **Each email is a new feedback item.** Replies in an email thread are not stitched together: a customer's follow-up email
  arrives as its own item rather than appending to the first one. Message-Id dedup only prevents the same email landing twice.
- **Emails with no text are dropped.** A message with an empty subject and an empty body is discarded rather than creating a
  blank item.

## Troubleshooting

**The Gmail verification never arrived.** It did, but not where you were looking: Gmail's confirmation email is delivered to the
forwarding address, which is your Usero inbound address. Open your feedback inbox and the confirmation code is in a feedback
item from Google. Paste it back into Gmail to activate the rule.

**A test email didn't show up.** Check the forwarding rule points at the exact address on your integrations page (the random
suffix matters). Mail to a misspelled address is dropped silently. Also check the email had text content: an empty message is
discarded.

**The same complaint appears twice.** Two items means two distinct emails (dedup is by Message-Id, and a customer sending a
follow-up generates a new one). If the two describe the same problem, clustering will group them; the emails themselves stay
separate items by design in v1.

**I don't see an address on the card.** Demo accounts don't get a forwarding address. On a regular account, opening the
Settings or Integrations page generates the address on first view; reload once if the card still shows a setup button.

## Next

- [Integrations overview](/docs/integrations)
- [Feedback clustering (how duplicate reports group)](/docs/clustering)
- [GitHub integration (turn a clustered report into a PR)](/docs/integrations/github)