If you have the Leads module enabled for your Socket account, you can forward an enquiry email to it and Socket reads the thread, drafts a lead with the contact details, notes, and next actions it found, and holds the draft for you to review before anything is created.
Email forwarding is in beta and is switched on per practice. To have it turned on for yours, message the team through live chat on our Contact Us page.
⚠️ Forwarding only works from an email address that belongs to a team member in Socket. Emails forwarded from a shared inbox, such as info@ or hello@, or from any address not on your team, do not reach Socket. If the enquiry arrived in a shared inbox, forward it from your own address instead.
Accept forwarded enquiries also needs to be switched on in Lead Settings. It will be enabled by default, but if it is switched off then emails sent to the address are not accepted.
Finding your forwarding address
Go to Settings, then Lead Settings.
Scroll to Forwarding Address.
Check that Accept forwarded enquiries is switched on.
Select the copy icon next to the address.
The address takes the form of your practice name followed by @leads.usesocket.com. Changes on this screen save as you make them.
Saving the address as a contact in your email client means it appears in the address suggestions when you start typing.
Forwarding an enquiry
Open the enquiry in your email client.
Select Forward.
Paste or type your practice's forwarding address in the To field.
Send.
A single message and a whole thread generate in the same way. Where the thread includes replies you have already sent, those are read too, so a question you asked the prospect or a promise to send figures is picked up as an action.
Socket checks the address the email was forwarded from, not the address of the original sender. The enquiry itself can come from anyone; the forward has to come from a team member.
Watching the lead generate
Once the email arrives, a new run appears on the AI Lead Generation screen.
Go to Leads.
Select Generate with AI at the top of the board.
Each run is listed with its status, who initiated it, and the subject. A run created from a forwarded email carries a Forwarded Email tag in the Subject column, and shows Generating while the draft is being written.
Select the run to watch it progress. The agent works through Discovery, Generate, and Review. During Generate it reads the discovery data, checks whether the company is already a client, and drafts the lead. This usually takes under a minute, and you can leave the tab while it runs.
✅ Nothing is saved until you have reviewed the draft, and nothing is sent to the prospect at any point.
Reviewing the draft
The review step shows the whole lead in editable fields. Anything can be changed or removed before saving. The sections are the same as for any lead generated with AI, and are covered in full in Creating a Lead in Socket. In brief:
Client: the company the lead will be created against, with its entity type. Where Socket finds a possible match in your client list, it offers Create a new prospect or Use an existing client, so a duplicate record is not created by accident.
The Lead: title, temperature, deal size, source, and an optional source note. The source is read from the email. Where the prospect says how they found you, that is recorded in the source note; where the email gives no indication, the source is set to Email.
Contact: name, email address, and phone number as they appeared in the email. An email address is required to create the lead.
New prospect: the company name, entity type, and company number, where the email included one.
Notes: what the email said about the business and the services it needs, grouped under headings.
Actions: the activities drafted from the thread. The enquiry email itself is recorded as an Email activity marked Already done. Anything you promised in a reply, such as sending figures, becomes a task with a due date where one can be inferred.
What the generation left open: anything the email did not cover, split into details you can add above, details with no field on the lead, and the judgement calls the agent made, such as how it set the temperature.
Back to Run returns to the generation screen. Create Lead will generate the lead on the Socket Leads kanban board and create a prospect record in your clients. If you have the Karbon integration set to create prospects from Socket, this will also create a prospect record there.
Creating the lead
Select Create Lead at the bottom of the review step. The lead is created on the Leads board with its contact, notes, and activities attached, and the run's status on the AI Lead Generation screen changes to Lead Created. The team member who forwarded the email is set as the lead's owner.
The source note appears when you hover over the source tag on the lead record.
The lead's timeline records the entry Lead generated with AI.
Completing the lead record
A forwarded enquiry gives Socket what the prospect wrote. Two further AI tools fill in the rest from the lead record and from public sources.
Generate summary, on the Summary card at the top of the lead, reads the lead's own record and reports where it stands, what needs attention, and what to do next. See AI Lead Summary.
Research, on the lead's Research tab, reads Companies House and the prospect's website and adds what it finds as research notes. See AI Lead Research.
Common questions
The email was sent but no run appeared. Check that it was forwarded from a team member's address and that Accept forwarded enquiries is switched on in Lead Settings. Emails from shared inboxes, from addresses not on your team, and any email sent while the setting is off, do not reach Socket.
Can I forward from a shared inbox? Not at the moment. Forward from an email address linked to a Socket user account instead.
Who owns the lead? The team member who forwarded the email. The owner can be changed on the lead record afterwards.
Does the prospect receive anything? No. Nothing is sent to the prospect at any stage of generation.