Getting started

Signing in

Held Open uses email and password sign-in — there’s no SSO, no magic-link, and no public self-signup. Every account is created by someone: the first-run setup below, an admin inviting you as a workspace user, or someone inviting you to collaborate on a specific mailbox.

1. Go to your instance’s sign-in page. You’ll land on Sign in — “Pick up where the queue left off.”
2. Enter your Email and Password, then click Sign in.
3. If your account has two-factor authentication enabled, you’ll be asked for an Authentication code next.
4. After several failed attempts in a short window, sign-in adds a short math CAPTCHA (“Solve this simple sum to continue”) before trying again.

There’s no workspace picker — signing in takes you straight into your default workspace. If your account doesn’t belong to one, you’ll land on a “workspace not found” page instead.

Session cookies last 30 days for browser sign-ins (there’s no “remember me” — it’s unconditional), or 90 days for a signed-in mobile app.

The first admin account

The very first time a Held Open instance runs, nobody has an account yet. A “First run? Create the admin account” link appears on the sign-in page — it only shows up while the instance genuinely has zero users, and disappears the moment setup completes.

That link leads to a single form: company name, your name, email, and password. Submitting it creates your account as a superadmin and signs you straight in. There’s no multi-step wizard and no post-setup checklist — from there you’re in the app, and the next thing worth doing is connecting a mailbox.

Getting invited

If someone else already set up your workspace, you’ll get here one of two ways:

• A workspace invite — an admin adds you under Settings → Users. You get an email with a link to /user-setup/…, where you set your name and password and click Activate my account. The link expires after 7 days.
• A mailbox invite — someone invites you to collaborate on a specific mailbox without necessarily making you a full workspace user first. If you don’t have an account yet, the invite link lets you create one and accept in the same step; if you already do, you’re prompted to sign in and the access is granted then.

Workspaces, in brief

A workspace (the backend calls it a “tenant”) is your team’s whole account — its users, mailboxes, and conversations, isolated from every other workspace on the same instance. Every screen you use lives under a /w/<workspace-slug>/ URL. The slug is set once, by whoever creates the workspace, and can’t be changed afterward — but the display name you see in the app and in outgoing email (Settings → General → Company name) can be changed any time.