Otto for agencies

The work is fine. The handoff is what kills you.

A client emails on Friday afternoon. The account manager is out. Someone else picks it up, misses the context from three weeks ago, and now you are apologising instead of delivering.

Otto starts where the work starts: the client thread. Ask for the reply and it drafts one using the conversation. Ask for the call and it proposes the event on the connected calendar. Ask it to track the thing you just promised and it lands as a task in Google Tasks or Microsoft To Do for the account you selected. Ordinary assistant sends and bulk changes show a review card. Optional standing rules need separate setup and limits.

Know which hat you are wearing

Agencies collect mailboxes: yours, the shared one, the one for that client who insisted. Otto connects several accounts and the selected account supplies the mail, the calendar and the tasks, so a reply cannot quietly go out from the wrong address. Free includes one account and paid tiers add more.

Connecting accounts is not the same as sharing a mailbox with your team, which is the part people get wrong when they are pricing this.

Make the handoff explicit

Otto's Team tier is where shared work lives: shared inboxes with assignment so one name owns the reply, internal notes that stay internal, collision detection so two people do not answer the same client at once, and shared drafts.

A shared draft stays a draft. Choosing to use it drops the text into the normal composer where you edit it, check the sender and send it yourself. Nothing your colleague wrote goes out unread.

Notes carry the context that does not fit in a thread. In a team notebook, comments with @mentions keep the discussion on the brief itself, and version history every 10 minutes means the pre-call draft is a restore away. When the client needs it, invite them into the note to edit it with you, send them a copy by email, or publish a read-only link they can open without an account.

The question your clients will eventually ask

Where does our mail sit. Gmail or Outlook remains the mailbox. Otto keeps an inbox list with message details so folders load quickly, and selected content may be saved in chats, notes, shared drafts or prepared work. What Otto stores explains the records and how long they stay.

The Friday cleanup, in one request

Agency inboxes fill with mail that needs filing rather than thinking: build notifications, form submissions, three months of newsletters. Ask for the whole lot to be archived or labelled at once, read the scope on the card, and approve it once. A bulk job runs in the background with live progress, so you are not clicking through four thousand messages to get to Monday.

Decide with a real week

Run one client account through Free first: the replies, the calls, the follow-ups. Then decide whether the shared address belongs in Team.

Read the multiple accounts guide, the shared team inbox guide and the shared drafts guide. If you are weighing a dedicated team tool, the Missive comparison is honest about where each one fits.