Connectors

Your office can think, write and plan on its own. It cannot reach the outside world on its own. The Connectors page is where you hand it the keys — above all a mailbox, so it can send the letters you approve and read the replies that come back.

Open Connectors from the left rail. It is in the bottom group — the long one that runs your office rather than its work — sitting directly under departments and billing and directly above your calendar. The position and the job of the page are the part to match on if your screen names the page differently from this guide — see languages your office speaks.

The page opens with one line at the top: Set up the connections your departments need — see what is required, optional, and already connected. Below it are three blocks, always in this order:

1. Knowledge sources — places your own files already live.
2. Your active departments and Other departments — what each part of your office needs before it can work.
3. Email connector — your business mailbox. This is the one to do first.

Start with the mailbox

Nothing your office writes leaves the building until there is a mailbox to send it from, and nothing anyone replies comes back in until that mailbox can be read. Until then a draft simply waits for you in the review queue.

You are not giving your office a new address. You are giving it yours — the address your customers already recognise — so a reply lands in the same place it always has.

One mailbox is connected at a time. The page says so plainly: Only one mail connection can be active at a time — connecting a new one automatically replaces the current one.

The two ways in

Under Email connector you will find a section headed Connect your business mailbox, with a Connect button beside three provider names: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Yandex Mail. That is the short path — you sign in with your provider the way you sign in to anything else, and nothing is typed.

Underneath it is Advanced: SMTP / IMAP, a form where you type the settings in by hand. It is slower, and it works for every mailbox on earth, including the ones with no sign-in button at all.

”Not available yet”

A sign-in button is only offered where it has been set up. Where it has not, the button is replaced by the words Not available yet, and a line explaining that this sign-in option is not set up here.

That is not a fault, and it is not something you can switch on. It means: use the manual form instead. The manual form is not a lesser path — it is the one that always works, and the step-by-step recipes below take you through it for the five kinds of mailbox small businesses actually have.

The recipes

Each of these takes you from nothing to a working mailbox: what you need, how to get the password, and the exact settings to type.

• Google Workspace — including Gmail on your own domain
• Microsoft 365
• Yandex Mail
• GoDaddy Professional Email
• cPanel or another web host — most small business hosting

If yours is not on the list, the shape is the same everywhere: an outgoing server name, an incoming server name, a port, your e-mail address as the username, and a password. Your provider publishes all five. Open Need help? on the Connectors page and, if you are still stuck, Still stuck? Ask the CEO hands the question to your CEO with the provider you were reading about already named.

Saving, testing, and what the words mean

Save the form with Save connector. Then press Test connection — your office actually tries the mailbox rather than taking your word for it. The status word beside the mailbox tells you where you stand:

What it says	What it means
Not connected	Nothing is set up yet.
Waiting for verification	Settings are saved, but Test connection has not passed yet.
Connected	The mailbox works.
Action needed	The mailbox itself is fine, but something else is stopping sending — the message beside it says what.

One cause of Action needed is a missing business postal address. Every business e-mail has to show a real address so the person receiving it knows who wrote; the form asks for it, and until it is there your office drafts but does not send. Whatever the cause, the note beside the status names it and tells you which button fixes it.

Disconnect takes the mailbox away again. The page is blunt about what that means: disconnecting removes this connection’s ability to send e-mail on your behalf, and it cannot be undone from that page.

The rest of the page

Knowledge sources sits above the departments and belongs to your whole office, not to any one department. It is for the files you already keep somewhere — see Sharing your material in the Knowledge section of this guide.

Departments each list what they need. The badge beside a line tells you how much it matters:

• Required — Workers won’t run until one of these is connected.
• Optional — Drafts work without this — sending needs it, or simply not required for this department to run.
• Coming soon — the page says it outright: there is nothing to connect yet. Several social and advertising connections read this way today. A department with a coming-soon line still does everything else it does; it just cannot do that one thing yet.

Nothing on this page is a trap. A connection you have not made blocks exactly the work that needs it, says so on the row, and blocks nothing else.