---
title: "Invitations"
description: "Share with someone who has not signed up yet and have them invited."
url: "https://openemail.uk/docs/knowledge/team/invites"
area: "Knowledge base"
category: "Workspaces & team"
status: "live"
---

# Invitations

Share with someone who has not signed up yet and have them invited.

## Details

- Every add is an invitation, whether or not the address has an OpenEmail account behind it. It carries the role, the addresses and the whole domains that were chosen at the time, so accepting produces exactly the access that was asked for rather than bare membership, both from Settings → Members and from the Share control on an address row. Nobody is put into a workspace they did not accept.
- A pending invitation grants nothing. It is not a member row and not an address grant, and no authorisation path in the product reads it. The person is a stranger to every check until the moment they accept, which is the only place an invitation ever becomes access. That is why the members screen lists them apart from the people, under a heading that says what they will get rather than what they have.
- The link is 256 bits of randomness and the database stores only a keyed hash of it, so a leaked backup does not yield a working invitation. It expires after fourteen days, and both halves have to line up to redeem it: holding the link proves somebody read mail sent to that address, and being signed in as that address proves who is accepting. Being signed in as somebody else is the refusal people actually hit, and the screen names both addresses and offers to sign out and switch, rather than leaving somebody to work out which account they are in.
- Ignoring the mail is not a dead end either. Somebody who was invited and then signs up on their own a week later finds the invitation waiting in the workspace menu and on the workspace overview, with an Accept button, for as long as it is open. Signing up with a different address does nothing, and the invitation stays outstanding.
- Invitations can be withdrawn, which kills the link immediately, or sent again, which mints a new link, restarts the fortnight and retires the old one. Asking twice refreshes the first invitation rather than sending two. The limits on it are anti-abuse and not a seat cap, and members are unlimited and never billed per person. One message every ten minutes to any given address, a hundred outstanding invitations per workspace, and two hundred sent in a rolling day counted per workspace and per person. The count lives in an append-only ledger rather than on the invitations themselves, so withdrawing one, deleting the role it named or deleting the workspace does not hand the allowance back.
- POST /members on the API does the same thing the screen does: it answers 202 with the invitation rather than a member, whoever the address belongs to, and PATCH and the grant calls only work on somebody already in.