Common questions
The things people actually write in to ask.
If your question is not here, send it to the address at the bottom of this page. We answer these ourselves, which is both the reason the list is short and the reason it is honest.
Getting started
How long does moving an existing mailbox take?
For most teams it is an afternoon. You point your existing support address at Fernpost, import the last few months of history, and carry on. The import runs in the background and your team can start answering new mail immediately — you do not have to wait for the history to finish, which is the part people expect to be painful and is not.
Can we run it alongside our old system for a while?
Yes, and we recommend it for the first week. Forward a copy of incoming mail to both systems and answer from whichever your team reaches for. Most people stop opening the old one within about four days without being asked to.
Does it work with a mailbox that is not on Google or Microsoft?
Any provider that supports IMAP and SMTP works, which in practice means all of them. We test against the five largest providers on every release and against a plain self-hosted server, because that is where the interesting failures are.
Day-to-day use
What stops two people replying at once?
Opening a conversation shows you, in the header, that a colleague is already looking at it. That is a warning rather than a lock — locking a thread turns out to be more annoying than the occasional collision, because the person holding the lock is usually the one who wandered off to lunch.
Can a customer see our internal notes?
No. Notes live on the conversation but are never part of the outgoing message. They are also excluded from the PDF export that you can send to a customer, and included in the one you export for yourself.
Is there a limit on saved replies?
No limit on any plan. The practical limit is that a team which has written more than about forty of them has usually stopped reading the list and started rewriting answers by hand, which rather defeats the point.
Technical
What are the API rate limits?
Sixty requests per minute per account on Starter, and 600 on Team and Archive. The limit is returned in a response header on every call so you can back off before you hit it rather than after. Full details are in the developer documentation, and the pricing page lists which plan you would need.
Where is our data stored?
In Germany, on servers we rent rather than own. We do not copy it anywhere else, including for backups, and we do not use the contents of your mailbox to train anything.
How do we delete everything?
There is a button in the account settings that deletes every conversation, every attachment and every note, immediately and without a recovery window. We ask you to type the account name to confirm, because it genuinely cannot be undone.
Still stuck?
Write to hello@fernpost.example and a person will answer. There is no ticket number and no automated first reply, which we appreciate is unusual enough to be worth mentioning.