Documentation

Getting started

1. Claim your address at /claim — at least 6 characters, letters and numbers. We email you a 6-digit code to confirm; the address is then reserved for you for 48 hours.
2. Activate it: subscribe ($10 a month), redeem a discount code, or apply for a trial by telling us what you'll contribute instead.
3. Invite your collective — share one link, no accounts to create for anyone.

The address works immediately: put it on your website, flyers, anywhere.

Members & roles

From the menu, open Members. Create an invite link, pick what role joiners get, and share it — it's valid for 24 hours, and whoever opens it signs up with their own email and notification preference. No passwords are ever shared.

Admins change anyone's role from the Members page with one tap. Removing a member keeps their past replies attributed.

The inbox

Inbox shows every conversation; Needs reply is your zero-target — it counts every thread where the sender is waiting; Mine is what's assigned to you. Conversations move to Answered automatically when a reply goes out, and you can close or tag anything.

• Assignment — claim a thread yourself or hand it to a teammate; the history shows who assigned what to whom, and when. If two people try, the first one wins and the second is told — no silent overrides.
• Internal notes — a private conversation right next to the email, invisible to the sender. Ask a teammate, leave context, decide together.
• Tags — freeform labels for filtering (#press, #bookings, …).
• Drafts — what you type is kept locally until sent, even if you close the tab.

Answering

Two ways, same result — the sender gets a reply from your collective's address:

• From the web inbox: open the thread, write, attach files if needed, send.
• From your own mailbox: reply to the notification email. The thread is assigned to you when your answer goes out. If someone answered first, your reply is stopped and you're told — the sender never gets two answers.

While you type in the web inbox, teammates see “…is drafting a response” live on the same thread.

Notifications

Per member, three levels: as they arrive, daily digest, or weekly digest. Instant notifications carry one-click actions — assign to me, assign to a teammate, mark as spam — and a live status badge rendered the moment you open the email, so a notification opened an hour late shows whether the thread is already assigned or answered, and by whom.

Billing & credits

The Collective plan ($10 a month) includes 10 sender seats and 1,000 replies a month; readers and commenters are always free and unlimited. Pro ($100) adds your own domain and room for big teams.

Credits: 1 credit = 1 month of service, and they're used automatically if a subscription or trial lapses (after which the inbox is read-only for a 30-day grace period). You earn credits by:

• Referring collectives — share your referral link from the Billing page. You earn a credit once the collective you brought has been active for a month and is really using its inbox.
• Contributing — onboarding other collectives, writing tutorials or blog posts, translating, running a workshop… Tell us what you did (or want to do) from the Billing page and we'll grant credits.

There's no free plan on purpose: everyone pays in money or in contribution, so the tool is sustained by the collectives it serves.

Your own domain (Pro)

Want hello@ourcollective.org instead of a @collective.email address? On the Pro plan, open Your domain from the menu and:

1. Enter the address you want at your domain.
2. Receiving — pick one: keep your current mailbox and add a forward to your @collective.email address (Gmail sends a confirmation that appears right in your shared inbox; there's a “send a test” button to prove the loop works), or point your domain's MX records at us for a full takeover. Careful with MX: personal mailboxes at the same domain stop working, so use forwarding if anyone has one.
3. Sending — add the DKIM and SPF records shown on the page wherever your DNS lives (Cloudflare, Gandi, OVH…). Adding them is the ownership proof. Hit “Check verification”; the moment it turns green, replies go out as your domain. Until then they're sent from your @collective.email address with your domain in the display name — honest and deliverable.

Your website and everything else on the domain are untouched. Pro can be paid like everything here: subscription, discount code, credits (a Pro month is 10 credits), or an application with a contribution.

Install as an app

The inbox is a PWA: on iPhone, open it in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen; on Android, Chrome will offer to install it. You get a full-screen app with your collective's inbox one tap away.