Replies by email or text, the documents that come with them, and mail from someone who is not the client.
A client can answer you without opening the form: by replying to the email or text Cartenda sent them. The reply is filed on the request it answers, and your team is emailed about it. Each person chooses which clients' replies they hear about; see Choosing which emails you get.
Open the request from Requests. What the client sent is under What they wrote back, newest last, with the date it arrived. The same messages show on the client's page, on the Messages tab, and beside the packet in the inbox.
Cartenda keeps what they wrote and drops the earlier conversation they quoted beneath it. You are not emailed about an automatic reply such as an out-of-office.
Every email Cartenda sends a client carries a reply address that belongs to that one request, so their answer lands in the right place even when they have several requests open. A text reply is filed on the most recent request sent to that number.
Documents attached to a reply are saved on the request and checked for malware, just like an upload. Until the check finishes, a document shows Being checked and cannot be opened. One that fails the check shows Withheld.
Cartenda keeps up to 10 documents from one email, each up to 25 MB. Everything emailed to one request together can be up to 100 documents and 500 MB, as much as one form can take. The reply says which it did not keep, so you can ask for them another way.
If your firm keeps documents in its own storage, emailed documents are not saved here. The reply says what came with it.
The reply address is in every email your client receives, and in every thread they forward. A spouse, an accountant or anyone else who has the thread can write to it, and the name on an email is easy to fake.
So Cartenda checks who sent each email. If the address is not one the request has, meaning the client's, the one on their contact record, a signer's or that of anybody else answering the request, the reply is still filed, but:
Documents from an address not on file are not read by Cartenda's AI checks while they are held, so a stranger writing to the reply address does not use up your checks.
When you have checked who sent them, press Accept attachments on the request to add them to the client's record. They are read then, as the client's own would have been. The request shows when they were accepted, and the activity log records who accepted them.
If they are not something you want, press Discard attachments instead. They are deleted from your storage and never reach the client's record. The message itself stays on the request, and the activity log records who discarded them.
If the sender is someone the client works with often, add their address to the client's contact record or as a signer, so their next reply is recognized.
Still stuck? Write to hello@cartenda.com and a person will answer.