You can set up a reply-to address when setting up the SMTP connection. This is done so if you’d like to send through a different email provider, and receive the response on a completely different inbox (for example, send via GSuite and receive on Outlook), or to get all your Instantly replies to your business email. This is not mandatory and you can choose to skip this option if you don’t need it in your use case.
It basically means that you can set a different email address where the replies from the leads will be redirected. So let’s say you have set a reply-to address as [email protected], sending account used in the campaign is - [email protected]. Now when a lead responded to [email protected] the email will be sent toward [email protected].
There are two ways you can set the reply to email address, both ways demand having your reply-to address connected to Instantly:
You can set your reply-to address from the account settings directly
You can set it when connecting an account via IMAP/SMTP connector, by checking the "Set reply-to" in the SMTP part
Note: we do not route messages for your email service provider. We simply add a reply-to header to your emails so that when a receiver clicks reply, they will be able to send a reply to your reply-to address. But some providers, like Google, will allow you to edit the field when you hit "reply" and you can delete the reply-to address that a sender (you) set in Instantly.
Even though the reply-to address should only come into play and populate the recipient's reply message's "To" field when the recipient hits the reply button, there is no assurance or mechanism to prevent the recipient from manually changing the "To" field back to your original sending address.