Outlook for freight forwarders. Nobody lives in the inbox.
The enquiry, the agent’s rate reply, the booking confirmation and the carrier bill all land in Outlook, and a person opens every one.
Every email your company receives is read, understood and turned into a task for the right person, with the answer already drafted. Your team approves. Nobody lives in the inbox any more.
Connect Outlook and no mail moves. Your team stops opening it to do the work, and the approved reply still goes out from it, in their name.
need DHL quote Gurugram → Ajman, 72kg, by Friday. express.
packing list attached. urgent pls 🙏
Pls quote for shipment as below. Confirmed pkg dims attached, IEC docs to follow…
- 01Outlook is where a forwarding company’s day arrives. Four or five shared addresses, every message somebody’s job to open, answer and file.
- 02Connect it and FreighAI reads those conversations, does the work behind each one, and hands a finished task to whoever owns it.
- 03Connects so FreighAI can read every conversation and send replies in your people’s names. Your team works in FreighAI, not in the inbox.
- 04Your team approves every reply before it sends. A draft stays a draft until a named person releases it.
- 05Nothing about your mail changes. An approved reply is sent through your own Microsoft 365 and saved in Sent Items.
The company runs in Outlook, and Outlook does not help
It is what happens when a business grows and the work keeps arriving as mail.
It is 09:10 on a Tuesday. A customer writes to pricing@ asking for two forty-foot high cubes from Nhava Sheva to Hamburg, spreadsheet attached. The gross weight is missing, so somebody writes back and asks. They mail three agents for the lanes the company holds no rates on. Two answer by lunch. Chasing the third is a job somebody carries in their head.
In a forwarding company, the work arrives as email. Enquiries. Rate replies from agents. Booking confirmations. “Where is my cargo?” Carrier bills. Payment chasers. Someone has to open each one, work out what it is, find the information, write the answer, pass it to the next person, file it, and remember to chase. The inbox is where your company actually runs. And the inbox does nothing to help.
Outlook is not what is wrong here. Microsoft describes Exchange Online as a cloud based messaging platform for email, calendar, contacts and tasks. Reading an enquiry, finding the rate, chasing an agent and drafting the answer is a different job, and no mail system was built for it.
Your mail stays put. Your people move out of it.
This is the whole difference, and it is worth being blunt about it.
Connecting Outlook migrates nothing. Your mail stays with Microsoft, searchable in the client your team already has.
FreighAI watches every company mailbox, pricing, operations, tracking and accounts, and follows each conversation from start to finish. It works out what each email is and what it needs, then takes the action that message calls for.
It writes the reply, creates the task, and puts it in front of the right person in the right department, beside the original conversation. Your team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name.
An email is only where the work starts. It pulls your rate cards, checks the carrier, looks up the customer’s history, reads the shipment status, and talks to your TMS or accounting system. Follow-ups, chasers and reminders happen on their own, on the same conversation.
- 01OutlookThe mail lands at pricing@ or operations@, exactly as now
- 02ReadThe whole conversation, not only the newest message
- 03The legworkRate cards, the carrier, the customer’s history, your agents
- 04TaskTo the right person, with the thread open beside it
- GATEYour team approves
- 06Sent from your OutlookIn their name, and saved in Sent Items
Keep your TMS for the records. FreighAI runs the work around them.
Your people work in FreighAI. Not in the inbox. Not in five browser tabs.
Outlook, end to end
Through Microsoft Graph, which Microsoft calls “the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft cloud services like Microsoft Entra and Microsoft 365”. Outlook is one of the services it exposes.
Microsoft’s own wording is that granting tenant-wide admin consent “is a sensitive operation”. Nothing is read before that happens.
Microsoft’s change notifications “enable applications to receive alerts when a Microsoft Graph resource they’re interested in changes”. Mailboxes you did not name stay out.
It writes the reply, creates the task, and puts it in front of the right person in the right department, beside the original conversation. Pricing, operations, tracking or accounts, depending on what the mail turned out to be.
Your team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name. The send goes through your own Microsoft 365, which “saves the message in the Sent Items folder”.
What your team can do once Outlook is connected
FreighAI watches every company mailbox, pricing, operations, tracking and accounts, and follows each conversation from start to finish. A thread running a fortnight is one piece of work, not fourteen unread items.
It writes the reply, creates the task, and puts it in front of the right person in the right department, beside the original conversation. The tenth message in a thread is read against the nine before it.
Reads PDF, Excel, Word, forwarded email, WhatsApp messages, photos and scans. Emails all your agents for a lane in one go, with the route and charge lines filled in, then chases the ones who do not reply. Suggests a price from what that customer paid on that lane before, within your margin rules.
Connects so FreighAI can read every conversation and send replies in your people’s names. Your team works in FreighAI, not in the inbox. The customer sees the colleague they know, on the conversation they started.
The mail is still in Outlook. The work is here.
This is the screen a coordinator opens instead of a shared mailbox. Every task on it came out of an email, carries the conversation beside it, and has a name on it.
- One place, not four mailboxesYour people work in FreighAI, not in the inbox.
- Approve, do not composeYour team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name.
What connecting it involves
- 01
Check what you are running
This is for Outlook on Microsoft 365. Microsoft says Exchange “is included when you sign up for Microsoft 365 Business or Microsoft 365 for enterprise subscriptions”. If your mail sits elsewhere, this is the wrong page.
- 02
Decide which mailboxes are in scope
Usually a small set of shared addresses. Microsoft advises them “when multiple people need access to the same mailbox”. Name the ones the business runs on. Personal mailboxes are a separate decision.
- 03
Say who owns which kind of mail
An enquiry belongs to pricing. A booking confirmation belongs to operations. A carrier bill belongs to accounts. One session with whoever makes those calls today decides whose name each task lands under.
- 04
Run it beside the team for a fortnight
Answer mail as you do now and let FreighAI work the same threads in parallel. Compare what it read out of each conversation with what your own person read. We scope the first workflow, integration requirements and implementation plan with your team.
What the Outlook connection does not do
Worth knowing before you plan around it.
- This connection reads conversations and sends replies. It is not a mail system. Exchange Online carries on hosting your mail, archive, spam filtering, calendar and contacts.
- Folders, categories, flags, rules and retention stay with your own mail administration. FreighAI does not reorganise your mailboxes.
- Nothing sends on its own. Your team approves every reply before it sends. A connected mailbox does not start answering customers overnight while nobody is watching.
- New mail is picked up quickly, not instantly, and sending is Microsoft’s to govern. Its documentation puts the expected latency for a mail notification at an average under one minute, and says delivery “is subject to Exchange Online limitations and throttling”.
- Only the mailboxes you consent to are read. A personal Microsoft account, or a private mailbox nobody put in scope, is not covered.
- Direct customs filing and duty lookup, statutory books, customer self-service portals and full warehouse management stay in the system you already run.
What stays in Outlook, what moves into FreighAI
A connection is only worth having when everybody knows which side of it a thing lives on.
Microsoft keeps your mail, FreighAI takes the work, your system of record keeps the record. Your customers notice a faster answer.
| What it is | Where it lives | What the connection changes |
|---|---|---|
| Mail hosting, addresses, archive, spam filtering | Exchange Online, exactly as today | Nothing at all. This is not what FreighAI is for |
| The incoming conversation | Your shared mailboxes | Watches every company mailbox, pricing, operations, tracking and accounts, and follows each conversation from start to finish. |
| The reply | Sent through your own Microsoft 365 | Your team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name. |
| Where your people spend the day | Today, in Outlook | Your people work in FreighAI, not in the inbox. |
- Mail hosting, addresses, archive, spam filtering
- Where it lives
- Exchange Online, exactly as today
- What the connection changes
- Nothing at all. This is not what FreighAI is for
- The incoming conversation
- Where it lives
- Your shared mailboxes
- What the connection changes
- Watches every company mailbox, pricing, operations, tracking and accounts, and follows each conversation from start to finish.
- The reply
- Where it lives
- Sent through your own Microsoft 365
- What the connection changes
- Your team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name.
- Where your people spend the day
- Where it lives
- Today, in Outlook
- What the connection changes
- Your people work in FreighAI, not in the inbox.
- 01Which mailboxes go in first, and which stay out for now?
- 02Who grants the consent, and what will they want to see before they do?
- 03Who approves a reply, and who covers when that person is away?
Most forwarders have more than one front door. The enquiry arrives in Outlook and the customer chases it on WhatsApp. Connecting one and not the other splits a single piece of work between two people who each know half of it.
Microsoft hosts it. Your addresses, archive, calendar and contacts stay where they are.
Reads the conversation, does the work behind it, creates the task, drafts the reply, and waits for a person.
The job, the documents, the customs entry and the books stay where they already are.
Common questions
Is this freight forwarding software that works with Outlook, or something that takes its place?
It works with it. FreighAI is an AI-first freight operations platform that runs the daily work of a forwarding company. It reads everything that comes in, does the work behind it, and hands your people finished tasks to approve. It can run on its own or alongside the TMS you already have. FreighAI takes the work that used to happen inside Outlook and hands the answer back to Outlook to send.
Do our customers or our agents have to change anything?
No. They write to the same addresses, on the same threads, and hear back from the same colleague. None of the connection is visible from outside.
Whose name is on the reply?
Your team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name. The message goes through your own Microsoft 365, and Microsoft says that action “saves the message in the Sent Items folder”.
What access does it need, and who signs it off?
Reading the conversations in the mailboxes you name, and sending replies from them. An administrator in your organisation reviews the requested permissions and grants or refuses them. Microsoft calls that a sensitive operation and tells administrators to review carefully. Start with one mailbox if that makes it easier.
What happens to a thread FreighAI does not understand?
Nothing is guessed. It spots what is missing in an enquiry and drafts the email asking for it. Where the message needs a judgement only a person can make, it becomes a task with no drafted answer pretending otherwise.
Does connecting Outlook mean our team stops using email?
They stop working in it. Mail keeps arriving and leaving, because that is how your customers talk to you. Your people work in FreighAI, not in the inbox.
- Microsoft Learn — Microsoft Graph overview: “the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft cloud services like Microsoft Entra and Microsoft 365”, with Outlook among the services it exposesverified 2026-09-03
- Microsoft Learn — sendMail action: “this method saves the message in the Sent Items folder”, and “delivery of the message is subject to Exchange Online limitations and throttling”verified 2026-09-03
- Microsoft Learn — change notifications “enable applications to receive alerts when a Microsoft Graph resource they’re interested in changes”; Outlook message is supported, with an average latency under one minute and subscriptions that expireverified 2026-09-03
- Microsoft Learn — Exchange Online: “a cloud based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks”, included with Microsoft 365 Business and enterprise subscriptionsverified 2026-09-03
- Microsoft Learn — About shared mailboxes in Microsoft 365: “use shared mailboxes when multiple people need access to the same mailbox”, such as company information and support addressesverified 2026-09-03
- Microsoft Learn — Grant tenant-wide admin consent: it “is a sensitive operation” and you should “carefully review the permissions that the application is requesting”verified 2026-09-03
Everything here about Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Graph comes from Microsoft’s own published pages on the date checked, and nothing from a third party. Microsoft’s pricing and plan comparisons are deliberately not repeated.
Open Outlook and find the ugliest thread of last week
Nine replies, two attachments, three people on copy, no clear owner. We will show what would have been read out of it, what would have been chased, and whose task it would have been.