Email discussions
Email discussions allow you to loop in additional people to threads from any channel - whether it be a Slack, MS Teams, or email based thread. Also known as "email forwarding", these discussions will include a copy of all messages in the thread, up to the current point in time, in order to help bring your email discussion recipient(s) up-to-speed quickly. Email discussions are a part of a larger feature-set in Plain known as "Thread discussions". Thread discussions are never visible to the customer with whom the thread is.
Getting started
To get started with email-based thread discussions you must have the Email channel set up in Plain. If you can already accept support threads via Email and respond to them, you're good to go. If not, please check out our Email getting started page.
To create an email discussion, or forward a thread via email, you will have to press the "+" icon in the thread sidebar next to the subtitle "Thread Discussions". Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut D.
This will open a modal where you must select the target channel for your discussion. If you have Slack enabled in your Plain workspace, you'll be shown all available Slack channels as well as an option called "Email".
Select the "Email" channel and then you can continue by inserting your email recipients and the message you'd like to send.
When sending an Email thread discussion, your discussion message contents will have the content of all previous thread messages appended to the bottom. This only happens for your initial thread discussion message, not any replies you may send. Your email discussion recipient will see this like a forwarded email or other quoted content in their email client.
Replies
Your email discussion recipients can reply to your email and their replies will appear in your sidebar's thread discussions. Just like the initial discussion, this will not be visible to the customer with whom the thread is.