Google Workspace and Gmail

If your team's mail lands in a Gmail or Google Workspace account, the easiest thing is to connect that account to Jelly. Jelly brings in the account's mail and sends your replies through it. There are no server details to find, and nothing to change on your domain.

Your mail stays in Gmail too. Jelly reads the account and sends from it, but never moves, marks or deletes anything there, so archiving or trashing a conversation in Jelly leaves Gmail exactly as it was.

Connecting a Google account

1. Go to Settings → Connections → Gmail. If an account is already connected, press Connect another Google account first.
2. Under What should Jelly do with the account?, leave Read and send its mail chosen. (The other choice is explained under Reading, or only sending.)
3. Press Connect a Google account.
4. On Google's sign-in page, sign in as the account your team's mail arrives in, such as support@yourcompany.com, and approve what Jelly asks for. If your organisation's Google admin blocks other apps, they'll need to allow Jelly first.

Google then sends you back to the account's page in Jelly. The account's address is now one of the team's addresses, already Verified, and it becomes the default if the team didn't have one.

To check it worked, send a message to the address from your own email and watch it appear in the inbox. Reply from Jelly, and the reply arrives from the team's address.

The email setup does the same thing when you choose Connect the Google account there.

What happens after you connect

• Recent mail comes in. Jelly brings in the account's latest 100 messages, including sent and archived mail but not spam, trash or drafts. Nobody is notified about these, and autoresponders and forwarding rules ignore them.
• New mail arrives from then on. Jelly follows the account's Inbox and Sent mail. Anything Gmail puts in spam, or that a Gmail filter keeps out of the inbox, doesn't reach Jelly.
• Replies go out through Gmail. They leave from the team's address and appear in the account's Sent mail.

New mail arrives as soon as it lands in Gmail. On a self-hosted Jelly that hasn't set up pushes from Gmail, it can take up to five minutes.

If you have no profile picture in Jelly when you connect the account, you're given the Google account's picture.

Reading, or only sending

What should Jelly do with the account? has two choices:

• Read and send its mail. Jelly brings in the account's mail and sends replies through it. This is what most teams want.
• Only send through it. Jelly sends replies through the account and never reads it. Choose this when the team's mail already reaches Jelly another way, such as forwarding or IMAP.

Google's sign-in page asks for the same permissions whichever you choose. With Only send through it, Jelly doesn't use the permission to read.

An account connected here to send only sends from its own address, and from any other addresses you add to it. If you want it to send for an address that's already on the team's list, such as one that's forwarded to Jelly, start from the email setup instead: type the address, and the setup offers Send through the Google account. A Google Group or an extra address has the full steps.

You can change your mind later on the account's page:

• Stop reading its mail switches the account to sending only. Mail that's already in Jelly stays.
• Read its mail too switches a sending-only account to reading. Jelly brings in the latest 100 messages, without notifying anyone, and follows new mail from then on.

If the address's mail was being forwarded to Jelly before you switched to reading, you won't get duplicates: Jelly keeps one copy of each message. Settings → Addresses tells you while forwarded copies are still arriving, so you know to turn the forwarding off in Gmail (Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP).

Adding the account's other addresses

A Google account can often send as more than one address, such as sales@ or an alias. Google calls these "send as" addresses. To answer from them in Jelly:

1. On Settings → Connections → Gmail, open the account's page (Addresses & status).
2. Under Other addresses this account may send as, tick the ones the team should answer from.
3. Press Add the ticked addresses.

They become team addresses, already Verified, and send through the account.

Each one counts towards your plan's limit. If the team is already at its limit when you connect an account, the account still connects, but its address isn't added.

Keeping it working

Each account on Settings → Connections → Gmail shows how it's doing:

To reconnect, open the account's page, press Reconnect with Google and sign in again. The account keeps the mode it was in.

If a message seems to be missing from an account Jelly reads, its page has two buttons to try. Sync now checks for new mail straight away. Import the latest 100 again fetches recent mail again, skipping anything that's already in Jelly and notifying nobody.

Disconnecting an account

On the account's page, under Remove the connection, choose Disconnect <account>… and confirm. Jelly also gives up its access at Google.

The account's addresses stay on Addresses, and their conversations stay in Jelly, but nothing can send from those addresses any more. They become Unverified and the From menu stops offering them. To send from them again, reconnect the account or put the addresses on an SMTP server.

If the email setup doesn't offer Google

The email setup works out whether an address is hosted by Google from its domain's mail (MX) records. If your domain's mail passes through a filtering service on its way to Google, Jelly can't tell, and offers the routes for other providers. Connect the account from Settings → Connections → Gmail instead.

Pushes from Gmail

This section is for whoever runs a self-hosted Jelly. On Jelly's own hosting it's all looked after for you, and Settings → Connections → Gmail shows none of it.

Without pushes, Jelly checks each Google account for new mail every five minutes. If you set up a Google Cloud Pub/Sub topic, Gmail tells Jelly about new mail as soon as it lands. The Pub/Sub subscription delivers to a Push endpoint on your Jelly.

The endpoint ends in a secret token, so only the Owner can see it. On Settings → Connections → Gmail, the Owner presses Pub/Sub push token information to see the Push endpoint.

Rotate the token…, in the same place, replaces the token. The old one stops working at once, so copy the new endpoint and update your Pub/Sub subscription to deliver to it. Until you do, mail still arrives within five minutes.