CNI Customer User Guide
CNI turns the customer email your business forwards to it into one organized inbox. Each email becomes a message with a category, a one-to-two sentence summary and the original text attached, so you can see at a glance what needs an answer first.
To get started you need a CNI account, your tenant ID (on the Connect email page) and an email connection. Bane Collective helps you set up the connection.
Getting started
Create your account at collective-neural-inbox.base44.app, then log in:
- Choose Register. Enter your email and a password, or continue with Google.
- Check your email for a verification code and enter it to confirm your address.
- Log in with your email and password, or with Google. If you forget your password, choose Forgot password? on the login page.
After you log in, you land on your inbox.
Your inbox
The inbox lists every message sent to your business, newest first. The messages below are sample data. The menu on the left takes you to Inbox, Insights, Training, Connect email and Settings. On a phone it becomes a bar across the top. The Dark theme switch at the bottom of the menu changes the colors.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Sender | The sender’s name, with their company or email below. New messages have an amber dot and a bold name |
| Summary | The AI’s one-to-two sentence summary. Hidden on narrow screens |
| Category | Complaint, Inquiry, Support, Feedback, Request or Other. A small tag marks newsletters and spam |
| Lead | High, Medium or Low, when the AI could score the sender |
| Assigned | Who is handling the message, if anyone |
| Status | New, Open, In progress, Resolved or Closed |
| Received | The date it arrived |
Find what you need
Type in the search box to match a sender, company, summary, message text or the person it is assigned to. Use the menus beside it to filter by status, category or mail type, and to sort by newest, oldest or highest lead score. The mail type filter can hide newsletters and spam, which the AI labels for you. When it is unsure, it treats mail as normal, so real mail is not hidden by default.
The inbox loads 100 messages at a time. Choose Load older messages under the list to bring in more. Search and filters cover the messages loaded so far.
Open a message
Click any row, or select it and press Enter. A panel slides in from the right with the summary, status, assignee, original message, notes and conversation history. Close it with the × button or the Escape key.
Work a message
- Status. Change it from the Status menu. It saves right away.
- Assigned to. Type a name or email and choose Save. Clear the box to unassign.
- Notes. Add a note for your team to read, and delete it with the bin icon. Each message holds up to 100 notes of up to 2,000 characters.
- Retry AI summary. If a summary could not be created, this button appears. Choose it to try again.
Save a copy
Choose Export CSV at the top right to save up to 5,000 of your messages as a spreadsheet file.
See the bigger picture
Insights shows your total messages, how many are still New, how many open messages have no owner, newsletters and spam, messages per week for the last 8 weeks, and messages by category. It reads your newest 2,000 messages.
Training your inbox
The Training page teaches CNI how your business writes. Open it from Training in the left menu.
- Paste a real customer email into Customer email, or drop a .txt file on the dashed box to fill it in. Only .txt files are supported.
- Paste the reply you actually sent into Your ideal reply.
- Choose Save example.
Saved examples appear below the form. The three newest are marked In use: CNI reads them as examples while it categorizes and summarizes each new message. You can keep up to 50 and delete any you no longer want. Choose emails you are happy with, and remove names or private details you don’t want stored.
CNI does not write replies yet, so training currently improves how incoming emails are sorted and summarized.
Connecting your email
Your tenant ID, webhook address and secret are on the Connect email page. The tenant ID tells CNI which inbox an email belongs to. Share these details only with the people setting up your email connection.
Email reaches CNI through a secure webhook. You don’t send mail to CNI yourself: your email service forwards each new message to the webhook address, along with your tenant ID and your secret.
Your secret. Choose Create my secret on the Connect email page. CNI shows it once, so copy it into your forwarding service straight away. CNI keeps only a scrambled version and cannot show it again. Rotate secret makes a new one and stops the old one working at once, so email will not arrive until the new secret is in your forwarding service.
Send a test message. This adds a sample message to your inbox so you can see how CNI sorts it. It counts toward your monthly total.
To set it up, we need:
- The mailbox whose email should appear in CNI, such as a shared info@ or support@ address
- The email service you use, such as Gmail or Outlook
We connect it, then send a test message and confirm it shows up in your inbox before you rely on it.
Settings, alerts and your data
Open Settings from the left menu.
This month. A bar shows how many emails CNI has received against your monthly allowance, 500 by default. The inbox shows a notice once you pass 80%. After the limit, new email is still saved, but CNI stops summarizing it until next month. Far past the limit, new email is refused. If you need more room, contact us.
Email alerts. Tick Complaints or High-value leads for an email right away, and Daily summary for one email a day. Alerts go to the address you sign in with and are off until you turn them on. Newsletters and spam never trigger an alert.
Delete my data. Delete my messages erases your messages, contacts and notes. Delete my account also erases your training examples and settings, then removes your login. Both ask you to type DELETE, and neither can be undone, so use Export CSV first if you want a copy. If CNI cannot remove your login by itself, we remove it within 30 days. Your monthly count is kept until the account is deleted, so deleting messages does not reset your allowance.
Troubleshooting and FAQ
An email I expected isn’t in my inbox. Wait a minute and refresh, and check that the status, category and mail type filters all say All. If it is still missing, contact us: the message may not have been forwarded to CNI.
A message says category “other” and “AI summary unavailable.” The email was saved, but the AI step could not run for that message. Open it and choose Retry AI summary. The original text is always in the panel. If it keeps failing, tell us so we can find the cause.
Can I reply from CNI? Not yet. You can change a message’s status, assign it and add notes, but replies and draft replies are planned. Reply from your normal email.
Summaries stopped appearing. You may have used your monthly allowance. Check Settings. New email is still saved, and summaries resume next month.
Who can see my messages? CNI is designed so each account sees only its own messages. See our Privacy Policy for how your data is handled.
I forgot my password. Choose Forgot password? on the login page and follow the emailed link.
Need help? Email devs@bane-collective.com.