Email

Your chatbot answering your support inbox, with the same knowledge, tools and workflows as on your website.

Before you start, build your chatbot and make it Live under Deploy: it answers only while it is Live. What works in every channel, such as signed-in users, is on the Channels page.

There is nothing to install and no account to create. ChatFrom gives the chatbot an address of its own; you forward your support address to it. Every message that arrives is answered in the same thread, so your customer sees the reply under their own email.

Setting it up

1. Under Channels, press Give this chatbot an address. ChatFrom shows an address such as chat-3f9ac2b1d4e5@inbound.chatfrom.io.
2. In your mail provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or wherever your domain's mail is), forward support@yourcompany.com to that address. Keep a copy in your inbox if you want to read along. Gmail asks the destination to confirm a new forwarding rule: that confirmation is passed on to your own inbox, so look for it there and follow its link.
3. Write to your support address from another account to try it. The answer comes back within a minute, from the chatbot's address.

To stop, press Disconnect, and remove the forwarding rule. The address stops answering at once. If you connect email again later, the chatbot gets a new address, and your forwarding rule has to follow.

Good to know

• The reply comes from the chatbot's address, not from your support address, in the same thread. A customer who replies writes to the chatbot, and the conversation continues; a thread is one conversation, kept for two weeks. Answering under your own address needs your domain verified, which is not built yet.
• Who is writing is checked. Anyone can put any address in an email's From line, so the chatbot treats the sender as that person, with the account they linked, only when the sender's mail provider vouches for the message (DMARC), as Gmail, Outlook and most business mail do. Other mail is answered, but as a stranger's, and cannot link an account.
• It answers people, not machines. An out-of-office, an auto-reply, a newsletter or a mailing list is left alone, so two robots can never answer each other.
• Quoted threads and signatures are removed before the chatbot reads a message, so it answers what the person actually wrote.
• A question with options is written out numbered, since email has no buttons. The person replies with the option or its number.
• One conversation per address, starting again after a day without a message, or when someone writes new. connect links their account, disconnect unlinks it.
• Attachments are not read yet. The chatbot answers the text of the message; a message with only an attachment gets a short line asking for text.
• If a reply cannot be sent, the Channels card says so, with Resend's reason. Press the connect button again once it is fixed.