We're retiring Personio Conversations and transitioning all customers to the Personio Assistant. The Personio Assistant uses the latest AI technology to help employees find answers and reduce HR tickets.
Conversations remains available until 30 June 2026, or your renewal date, whichever comes first. We’ll remove access after that date. The Personio Assistant is included at no additional cost.
In this article, you will learn how to forward emails from your personal inbox to Conversations and how to set up email forwarding for existing shared inboxes.
Tip:
Unlike Slack and Microsoft Teams, which have to be integrated with Conversations, email is enabled by default. Learn more about how employees can send requests via email.
Forward emails from your personal inbox
You might occasionally receive an email in your personal inbox that should have been a request in Conversations. In this case, you can forward the email to the Conversations inbox of the relevant team in order to create a request on behalf of the original sender.
Note:
You or another member of your organization will need to have first created a team in Conversations.
The original sender of the email will be set as the requester of the request, which means they will receive all notifications, replies, and updates about the request via email.
To forward an email from your personal inbox, follow these steps:
- Go to the email that you received in your personal inbox.
- Forward the email to the relevant team in Conversations. You can find a list of team email addresses in Conversations by going to Settings > Organization > Teams.
Tip You can add more information to the email when forwarding and this will be included as part of the request. This information will also be visible to the original requester.
The relevant team will receive the request and can action it accordingly.
Set up forwarding for existing shared inboxes
You can set up automatic email forwarding for your existing email inboxes so that all requests are seamlessly directed to Conversations.
Below are some of the benefits of setting up email forwarding:
- Employees can still contact HR or other internal service teams in the way they are used to, so you don't need to introduce new processes.
- You avoid having to monitor multiple inboxes.
- All requests are stored centrally in Conversations.
See the instructions below for setting up email forwarding for the most common email providers, Gmail and Outlook. If you use a different email provider, refer to their website for information on email forwarding.
Tip:
You could create an automatic reply in your existing shared team inbox. This could be an automated message to let the requester know that their request has been successfully forwarded to Personio Conversations and will be actioned shortly.
Gmail
Note:
The settings for the email provider outlined below are subject to change. If you notice a difference between what is described in this article and the interface of the email provider, refer to the Gmail article on email forwarding.
To set up email forwarding for your Gmail account, follow these steps:
- Log in to your shared email inbox.
- Go to Settings > See all settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
- Click on Add a forwarding address and enter the address of the Conversations team that you want to forward the emails to. You can find the email addresses of all your teams in Conversations by going to Settings > Organization > Teams. Note: You or another member of your organization will need to have first created a team in Conversations.
- Confirm the forwarding in the next dialog.
- Google needs to verify that the email address you're forwarding to is really owned by you. To do so, they send a verification link to the email address.
- Go to Conversations to find a new request from Google with a title containing “Forwarding Confirmation”.
- Either copy the nine-digit code or click on the first link in the email to confirm the forwarding.
- Once confirmed, you can then enable forwarding by going back to Gmail > Settings > See all settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP and then selecting Forward a copy of incoming mail to and selecting the address you just added (in most cases it will be pre-selected).
Tip You can also choose what to do with the forwarded email, for example, keep it in your inbox, archive it, or delete it. - At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
Outlook
Note:
The settings for the email provider outlined below are subject to change. If you notice a difference between what is described in this article and the interface of the email provider, refer to the Microsoft article on email forwarding.
To set up email forwarding for your Outlook account, follow these steps:
- Click the Gear icon > Settings > View all Outlook settings.
- Click on Email > Forwarding.
- Check the box Enable forwarding and enter the email address of the Conversations team to which you want to forward your emails. You can find the email addresses of all your teams in Conversations by going to Settings > Organization > Teams. Note: You or another member of your organization will need to have first created a team in Conversations.
- Click Save. Tip Check the box Keep a copy of forwarded messages if you want a copy of the original mail to remain in your Outlook inbox.
Alternatively, you can follow the steps below to achieve the same result:
- Click the Gear icon > Settings > View all Outlook settings.
- Click on Mail > Rules and click the Add new rule button.
- In the Name field, enter the name of this rule. (e.g. "Redirect email to Conversations")
- In the Add a condition field, select Apply to all messages.
- In the Add an action field, select Redirect to and enter the email of the team in Conversations. You can find the email addresses of all your teams in Conversations by going to Settings > Organization > Teams. Note: You or another member of your organization will need to have first created a team in Conversations.
- Click on Save and make sure the rule is activated.