How-to guide

Automate your inbox with rules

Rules tag, assign, prioritize and reply to conversations for you the moment they arrive. Each one is a simple when / if / then, so it does exactly what you set up, every time.

Create a rule

Open Settings and select Rules. Owners and admins can manage rules. Pick a template or Start from scratch. Once you have rules, use New rule.

Give the rule a name, choose When it runs, add conditions under If and actions under Then, then select Create rule. The summary at the top of the editor reads your rule back in plain language as you build it.

Rules follow your instructions exactly. No AI reads or decides anything, so rules never use AI conversations.

When

A new conversation starts: Runs once, on the first message of a new email or chat.
A customer sends any message: Runs on every customer message, including the first one and every reply.

If

With more than one condition, choose whether to match all or any of them. A rule with no conditions runs on every conversation. Text matching ignores capital letters.

Sender: is, is not, contains, or ends with. Type a full address, or just a domain such as customer.com to match everyone there.
Sent to: is, contains, or ends with. Matches the To, Cc and forwarded-to addresses of an email, so it works for aliases. Email only.
Subject: contains, doesn't contain, is, or starts with.
Message text: contains or doesn't contain. Looks only at what the customer wrote, not earlier emails quoted below it.
Channel type: is Email or Chat.
Channel: is any of, or is none of, the channels you pick.
Tags: include or don't include a tag, counting tags added when the email arrived or by an earlier rule.
Time: is inside business hours, or is outside business hours. Uses the office hours set on the conversation's channel, or else on your first website channel that has them (Channels → your website). If no channel has office hours yet, every time counts as inside business hours.
Priority: is Urgent, High, Medium or Low, including a change an earlier rule just made.

Then

Assign to a teammate: Hand it straight to one person.
Assign to a team: Set the team and round-robin to a teammate in it who's online. If nobody is online, it waits in the team's queue unassigned.
Add tags: Label it for reporting and views.
Remove tags: Take labels off.
Set priority: Move it up or down the queue.
Send an auto-reply: Email the customer straight back. See the details below.
Snooze: Hide it until the customer replies, or for 1 hour, 4 hours, 1 day, 3 days or 1 week.
Close: Mark it done.

A rule can use each action once. It can't assign to both a teammate and a team, or both snooze and close. When a rule replies and closes, the reply goes out first.

If a teammate can no longer take conversations from that channel, or a team or tag has been deleted, that action is skipped and the rest of the rule still runs.

Order and stopping

Rules run top to bottom, and every rule that matches runs. Later rules see what earlier ones changed, such as a new tag or priority.
Turn on Stop processing more rules to skip the rules below once this one matches. The rule then shows Stops later rules.
Change the order with the up and down arrows beside each rule.
Use the switch to turn a rule off. Rules that are off never run. Deleting a rule stops it straight away; conversations it already changed stay as they are.
Each rule shows how often it has run, for example Matched 12 times in the last 7 days.

Automatic replies

Write the message yourself, or pick Start from a saved reply…. Use Insert field to personalize it with fields like {{contact_first_name}}. To keep auto-replies safe and polite, Sonny sends one only when it makes sense:

Email conversations only, sent in the email channel's name.
At most once per conversation, even if several rules match, and at most once a day to the same person.
Never to automated mail: other auto-replies, bounces, mailing lists or no-reply senders. Never to an address that has bounced, marked your email as spam, or that you've blocked.
Only when the email passed spam checks and the sender's email provider confirms it really came from them (a check called DMARC, or SPF). This stops anyone from faking a sender to make you email a stranger.
Contact details you insert, such as a name, are shortened to plain words of up to 40 characters, so nobody can slip a link into your reply through their own details.
The reply is marked as automatic, so other autoresponders don't answer it. It doesn't quote the customer's email back or add your email signature, so sign off in the message itself.
In the conversation, the reply carries an Automatic badge.

How rules fit with the rest of Sonny

Rules run after your channel's and email address's default assignment, team and tags, so a rule's assignment wins.
Every change a rule makes appears in the conversation's Activity as Rule “Name”, so you can always see why something happened.
On chat, rules run after your AI assistant has answered and never switch it off. The assistant keeps replying, and a rule's assignment decides who gets the chat when the assistant hands it over.

If every email sent to one address should always go to the same person, team or tags, set that on the address itself in Email routing. Use a rule when you need conditions such as keywords, senders or business hours, or actions like priority, snooze or an automatic reply.

Quick-start recipes

Each template opens the editor pre-filled, so you can review it, choose the teammate or tag, and save.

Acknowledge new emails: When a new conversation starts, if Channel type is Email, send an auto-reply that thanks the customer and says you'll reply shortly.
Route an alias to a teammate: When a new conversation starts, if Sent to isbob@yourcompany.com, assign to a teammate: Bob. The alias needs to forward to your channel's Sonny address.
Tag by keyword: When a new conversation starts, if any of Subject or Message text contains “refund”, add your Refund tag.
After-hours auto-reply: When a new conversation starts, if Channel type is Email and Time is outside business hours, send an auto-reply saying when you'll be back.