Receiving Inbound Emails

HR Partner has a powerful way to enable you to communicate with your employees.  More information on how to send emails to employees can be found on this help article page.

Your employees can now reply to these messages, and their replies will be stored in HR Partner under the employee's record for later reference.  This enables you to track conversations with your team in much better detail, and retain the details of those conversations within HR Partner.

But there is more - you can even use the email capability in HR Partner to upload file attachments against your employee records, and allow your employees to upload files the same way.

Enabling Inbound Emails

By default, two way emails are disabled for all HR Partner companies, but you can easily turn it on by going to Setup > Company Info and checking this option flag and saving:

This will enable your company to be able to receive emails from your employees and job applicants, as well as send them out as before.

Inbound Email Addresses

Every employee in HR Partner now has a unique email address that is used by our system.  The email address comprises of their employee code, your HR Partner subdomain, and our new HR Partner email main domain which is hrpartner.email.

For example, if your employee John Smith's code is SMIT495, and your company subdomain is acmeinc, then John's incoming email address will be smit495@acmeinc.hrpartner.email

This means that any email that is sent to the above email will be accepted by our incoming email handler, and processed & stored against John Smith's employee record in your company.

You don't have to send directly to that email either.  If you cc that email address, then the system will still file the email against their record.  So for example, if John Smith's normal email was john.smith@acmeinc.com, then if you sent an email to john.smith@acmeinc.com from your Microsoft Outlook or Google Mail account and cc'd the same email to smit495@acmeinc.hrpartner.email, then the email would still be filed against John Smith's record in HR Partner.

This is handy if you are communicating one on one with your team, but what if you are sending an email from Outlook/GMail to multiple employees?  Well, you could always cc that email to each of their unique HR Partner email addresses, but this can become quite tedious.  So we have a generic 'collect all' email address which is: inbox@<your subdomain>.hrpartner.email

This means you can send an email to a bunch of employees at acmeinc, and cc that email to inbox@acmeinc.hrpartner.email and the system will look at the email addresses you send the email to, and compare them to the email addresses that you have set up for your employees in HR Partner, and file the email against all those that match.

Email Replies

All emails sent to employees from within HR Partner will contain their inbound email address (as well as the admin user's email address) in the 'Reply To' header.  This means that when they reply, the email will go to the admin users normal email box outside of HR Partner, but also will be sent to the employee's record in HR Partner.

File Attachments

Any email attachments sent to an inbound address will be extracted and stored in the employee record under their File Attachment area.  This means that you can use the new inbound email feature as a way to upload files to your employee records without having to manually upload them within our web app.  Employees themselves can also upload files to their employee record this way.

Viewing Incoming Emails

We have added a new section on the Employee View screen which will let you view emails that have been sent to and from the employee.

From here, you can send emails, look at emails that have been sent to the inbound email address, and even reply to them without having to leave your HR Partner session.

You can also delete any unwanted emails from the system.

Security Restrictions

To minimise the chances of spam and abuse of the incoming email feature, we have limited the scenarios whereby the email will be processed and filed in HR Partner.

1. If you send directly to an employee's inbound email address, the 'From' address sending the email MUST match the email address of an existing admin in your HR Partner company.
2. If an employee sends an email to their inbound email address, the 'From' address sending the email MUST match any of the email addresses stored within their employee record in your HR Partner company. (Note: This doesn't have to be their primary email address, but can even be their personal email address).
3. Any email sent to the global company inbox@ account must originate from an email that matches any of the company admin email addresses only.

Receiving Emails from Third Party Services

As per our security restrictions above, if you need to receive emails from an external or third party system (e.g. have your payroll provider send through payslips for your employee that you wish to file against their HR Partner records), then you can set an 'Allowed Inbound Email Address' in the system to permit a non admin or employee email to be able to send inbound emails.

To do this, go to Setup -> Configure -> Inbound Allowed and you can add as many external email addresses as you like.

Within this area, you can nominate the employee file attachment category that you want any email attachments saved to against the employee - so for example if you wish to have your payroll system send through payslips as a PDF file, and you wish to save those PDFs into the 'Payslips' folder in each employee's file attachment area, then you can set this up on the 'Inbound Allowed' settings.

You can also set whether any email attachments uploaded will be visible to the employee, and whether you wish to automatically mark any emails coming from these addresses as being read already.

Spam Emails and Viruses

Our incoming email system has a rudimentary spam and virus checker which should filter out most harmful or abusive messages, but we cannot guarantee that any might slip through from time to time.  If you notice any suspicious or malicious behaviour with your incoming emails, please contact our support team to look into this for you.

Read the initial announcement of this new feature on our Development Blog and subscribe to learn about the latest changes within HR Partner!