Create your first automation
Walk through building a complete automation from scratch in the manual builder. By the end you’ll have a working rule that auto-tags any inbound email containing the word “refund.”
Before you start
- Admin permissions to edit automation rules
- A read of What are Automations? helps but isn’t required
Steps
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Open the rules page. Go to Settings → Automation Rules. The page opens on the Manual Builder tab.
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Start a new rule. Click New rule in the top-right. The builder opens with an empty rule and the trigger panel selected.
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Pick a trigger. Choose Message received from the trigger list. This fires for every message an agent did not send — customer messages, and a few system-generated ones — which is what we want for content matching.
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Add conditions. In the conditions panel, add one condition:
Field:message.content
Operator:contains
Value:refund -
Add a branch. The builder starts with an Always branch. Leave it as Always — we want to tag every message that passed the conditions above.
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Drop in an action. Inside the Always branch, click Add action → Add tag. Pick the tag Returns (create it in Tag Management first if it doesn’t exist).
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Name and save. Give the rule a descriptive name like “Auto-tag: Returns”. Click Save.
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Enable it. Toggle the rule On at the top of the editor. The rule is now live.
Verify it worked
Send a test email to one of your inboxes containing the word “refund” in the body. Open the conversation that arrives — within a few seconds the Returns tag should be applied.
If you don’t see the tag after 30 seconds, open Run History on the rules page. Filter by your rule, status, and the date range for your test, then open the matching row. The row shows the action chips, failure reason, and any errors. Contact-scoped runs may show a dash instead of a conversation link.
Troubleshooting
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Symptom: Rule didn’t fire at all. Fix: Confirm the rule is enabled. Confirm the trigger is Message received, not Conversation created (the latter fires only on the very first message). Then open Run History and filter by the rule, status, and date range for the expected run.
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Symptom: Rule fired but the tag wasn’t applied. Fix: Open Run History, find the failed run, and read the row’s action chips and failure reason. The most common cause is the tag being deleted or renamed since you wired up the rule.