Each church on A Church Near You has an inbox helping members of the public get in touch with someone from the church.
When the public contact the church using the get in touch form, an email is sent to the address listed on the get in touch page.
Who can access the inbox?
Editors with either Administrator or Editor roles can read inbox messages. Those with a Publisher or Champion role cannot access the inbox.
If you cannot currently access the inbox but need to, please contact the Administrator of your church’s ACNY site and ask them to change your role to Editor. If your church is in vacancy you may not have an Administrator, so contact the editor help centre instead.
How to access the inbox and reply to messages
- Click on churches and benefices in the top menu, and then click on the cog beside the church you want to edit.
- In the editor menu, click on inbox
- Current messages are shown in bold on the inbox tab and you can see the date, time and email address of the sender.
- Click on the message to read and respond.
- Once open, click on email sender to open your default email application to reply. If your email does not open, copy and paste the sender’s email address into your email application.
- Click on mark as done and archive when you have responded to the message.
When a message has been opened, it is greyed out in the inbox tab.
Accessing Inbox on your smartphone
You can also access the Inbox by logging into A Church Near You on your smartphone.
Once logged in to your church page you will see a dashboard with the Inbox in the top left-hand corner. If you click on this, you can then access the Inbox.
If you click on a message you can read it, and then you are given two options: ‘Mark as done and archive’ or ‘Email Sender’.
If you mark the email as done it will be removed from the inbox and moved to the Archive. You can’t delete messages on ACNY. If you click ‘email sender’ you will be able to email the sender using your smartphones own email application.
Archiving messages
There are two ways to archive a message.
- You can open a message and click mark as done and archive.
- Or, on the inbox tab, tick the circle next to the message and then refresh the page.
To see inbox messages that have been archived, click on the archive tab.
Can I delete inbox messages?
For Safeguarding and GDPR reasons you are not able to delete any of these messages. Additionally, you are not able to automatically forward this Inbox to another mailbox.