How email ingestion works

The two-way flow at a glance

Navigator sits between your existing email addresses (the ones your customers and suppliers already write to — hello@, accounts@, invoices@) and your team. Inbound emails are pulled in automatically; outbound replies go back out under your existing addresses. From the outside, nothing looks different.

How inbound emails get into Navigator

Navigator gives your account a dedicated ingestion email address — something like yourbusiness@planmanager.kismet.healthcare. Your integration manager will share the exact address with you during setup.

Your IT admin then configures your existing email addresses to forward a copy of every incoming message to that ingestion address. Critically, the message also stays in your existing inbox — it's a copy, not a redirect.

Once a copy lands in Navigator:

1. Navigator parses the email — sender, subject, body, any attachments
2. AI triage classifies it — is this an invoice, a customer query, a supplier query, junk, or a reply to an existing thread?
3. A task is created with the right tag attached, so it routes to the right team queue
4. Your team works it from the Navigator inbox or task queue

For more detail on the AI classification step, see AI email categorisation. For the tags Navigator applies automatically, see System tags reference.

How outbound emails leave Navigator

When a team member sends an email from Navigator — replying to a supplier, sending an approval request, sending a remittance — Navigator sends it as your existing email address, not as the ingestion address.

So if Lauren on your team replies to a supplier from Navigator, the supplier sees an email from accounts@yourdomain.com.au in their inbox, just as they would have before. Replies thread back into the same conversation.

The technical name for this is "send-on-behalf-of" — Navigator is configured at setup so it can send legitimately under your domain. Your IT admin sets that up once during migration.

What customers and suppliers see

Nothing different. From their perspective:

• They write to your normal email address, the one they've always used
• They get replies from your normal email address
• The conversation threads as expected

The Navigator ingestion address (yourbusiness@planmanager.kismet.healthcare) is internal-only — your customers and suppliers never see it, never need to know about it, and never email it directly.

Behind the scenes

For curious readers, here's roughly what happens after an email forwards to Navigator:

• The email is parsed — headers, body, and attachments are extracted
• It's stored against your account as an audit record, threaded with any related conversation
• An AI agent reads it and decides what kind of email it is. The categories are spam, customer query, supplier query, an existing-thread reply, an invoice, a service agreement, a quote, a receipt, or unclassified
• A task is created with the matching tag — for example, an inbound invoice gets the Invoice tag and starts moving through the invoice automation pipeline
• If there's an attachment like a PDF invoice, Navigator extracts the data using AI vision and runs validation checks — see Automated invoice creation
• Your team gets the right task in the right queue — usually within seconds

The whole pipeline runs without human intervention. By the time a team member sees the task, it's already been read, classified, and tagged.

Common questions

Will my existing email addresses still work?
Yes. Forwarding doesn't change anything about your existing addresses — it just makes a copy of each message go to Navigator as well.

Will customers and suppliers see the Navigator email address?
No. They keep writing to your normal addresses and receive replies from your normal addresses. The ingestion address is purely an internal pipe.

What if Navigator misses an email?
The original copy is still in your existing inbox. You can manually forward it again, or your IT admin can use the email server's message trace to verify what happened. See the technical guide for diagnostic steps.

How does my IT admin set this up?
See Setting up email forwarding in the Migration section — that's the step-by-step technical guide.