Email and channels
Business-Gym reads inbound work from three channel families today: Microsoft 365 mailboxes, LinkedIn conversations, and Facebook and Instagram. Everything they bring in rides the same triage pipeline, and everything that would leave your company waits for a person.
The channel picker lists more kinds than that. This page separates what actually carries traffic from what is only wired up, so you know which inboxes you can move onto the platform.
Which channels can Business-Gym read today?
Section titled “Which channels can Business-Gym read today?”Email carries the real volume today, and LinkedIn and Meta run alongside it — everything else in the picker is wired but not in service. The honest state of each channel is below.
- Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes — live. Eleven or more of them in a typical setup, each bound to one owner Head.
- Microsoft 365 personal mailboxes — live. You grant read access to your own mailbox once.
- LinkedIn — live, through a desktop operator on a machine you control.
- Facebook and Instagram — live for inbound. Read and triage only; no reply path.
- WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Microsoft Teams, web form, phone and reviews — not available yet.
Everything on the live list lands in the same place: the triage queue described in the inbound triage cockpit.
How does your email get in?
Section titled “How does your email get in?”You bind a mailbox to a Head on the Channels page, under Build in the sidebar, and Business-Gym reads it from there. A tenant administrator connects Microsoft 365 once with Connect Microsoft 365; after that you can add shared mailboxes yourself.
Each mailbox has exactly one owner Head — sales@ to Sales, jobs@ to HR, an invoice mailbox to
Accounting — and a front-door address like info@ can fan out across Heads. That binding is what
decides where an item is routed, so it is worth getting right before you add volume. Read
working with a Head if you are not sure which Head owns what.
Your own mailbox is separate. Add personal mailbox runs a sign-in where you grant read access to your delegated mailbox — useful for an owner or CEO whose work does not arrive at a shared address.
Each row shows a health chip: Connected, Degraded or Disconnected. A disconnected mailbox is not silently skipped, and it is not quietly retried forever — it says so on the row.
Can Business-Gym send an email for you?
Section titled “Can Business-Gym send an email for you?”It can draft one, and a person sends it. Email send is the only mail write verb in the system, and the read path is built so it cannot send at all — the mailbox reader has no send method on it, by design.
An approved reply is sent from the real shared mailbox it arrived at and threads into the original conversation, so your customer sees one continuous thread. Nothing about that changes the gate: external send is human-approved, permanently.
How do LinkedIn and Meta work?
Section titled “How do LinkedIn and Meta work?”Neither one behaves like a mailbox, and the differences matter in daily use. LinkedIn runs through a desktop app; Meta is read-only.
LinkedIn arrives through the BG UI Operator, a desktop application that runs on a PC you control and works inside your own logged-in LinkedIn session. Registered operators are managed under Admin ▸ Operators. On the Channels page each LinkedIn row shows an operator chip — operator live, operator offline or operator not connected — because when that machine is off, nothing new arrives and you should be able to see why. Your company page inboxes are listed separately, and none of them is read until you connect it.
A LinkedIn reply never leaves on its own either. When the reply path is enabled, the operator types the approved draft into the LinkedIn compose box and stops — you click Send yourself.
Facebook and Instagram are polled for inbound conversations and comments, which are classified and routed like any other item. There is no reply path for either today: you can triage an item and act on it elsewhere, but you cannot answer it from inside Business-Gym.
Which channels are not available yet?
Section titled “Which channels are not available yet?”WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Microsoft Teams, phone and voice, web forms and reviews are not available yet, even though you will see all of them in the Connect a channel picker.
The adapters for those kinds are written and the picker will hand you a webhook URL and a signing secret, but the provider credentials behind them are not in service — so no messages flow. Do not plan a migration off your current WhatsApp or Slack workflow on the strength of that picker.
If one of those channels is what you actually need, the honest answer today is to keep it where it is and route the work that matters into a monitored mailbox instead.
How far can one channel act on its own?
Section titled “How far can one channel act on its own?”Not far, and that is deliberate. Each mailbox carries an autonomy mode you set on its row, and the default is the most conservative one.
- Read-only — triage and digest only. No replies are sent. This is the default for a new mailbox, and new non-email channels are created read-only too.
- Draft & stage — a reply is drafted and staged for your approval. This is the mode most teams work in.
- Auto — present in the picker for low-risk categories with a clean track record. Do not rely on it: a customer-facing reply is classified as an external send, and the approval dispatcher fires only on an explicit human approve.
Two rules sit above the mode and do not move. Anything that sends externally is approved by a person, and a message flagged by the injection guard or classified with low confidence can never be auto-sent — it is forced back to you. See autonomy and the hard floor for why that floor exists, and working the queue for what approving actually looks like.
Next: see the full connector list on Integrations, or read how an item becomes a proposed action in the inbound → approve → execute loop.