Managing email conversations in the Inbox

Yasir

Last Update il y a 2 jours

Email conversations arrive in your Inbox alongside your chats and other channels. You reply from the same composer, and your reply is sent from the address the customer wrote to.

Where email arrives

Mail sent to a connected address appears in your Inbox as an email conversation, labelled with the inbox it belongs to. If you have several inboxes connected, conversations from all of them arrive here, subject to each inbox's visibility.

Reply to an email

  1. Open the conversation from your Inbox.
  2. Type your reply in the composer.
  3. Select Send.
Your reply is sent from the connected address, so the customer sees a reply from the address they originally wrote to, not from a tawk.to address.

Send and receive attachments

You can attach files to a reply from the composer, and attachments on incoming mail appear with the message so you can open or download them.

The maximum size for a single attachment is 25 MB. A larger file is rejected when you add it, not when you send, so you find out immediately rather than after writing your reply.

Note: if you paste a file into the composer rather than attaching it, use the attach control or drag the file in. Pasting is intended for text and images.

External images in incoming mail

Email can contain images loaded from the sender's own server, and requesting those images tells the sender you opened the message. tawk.to blocks external images by default and shows External images blocked on the message.

  • Select Show images to load them for that message.
  • Select Hide images to block them again.

Showing images applies to that message for your current session only, it is not a permanent setting, and it does not change anything for your teammates.

Note: because there is no proxy in between, selecting Show images requests them directly from the sender's server. For a message you are unsure about, leaving images blocked is the safer choice.

Forward a message

Open the message's actions and choose Forward. The forwarded message keeps its original context, so the recipient can see what was forwarded and from where.
Forwards send immediately and cannot be undone, unlike replies, they have no undo window. Check the recipient before you send.

Undo a reply you just sent

When you send a reply, we hold it for a few seconds before it goes out. During that time an Undo option appears, select it and the reply is cancelled and returned to your composer, so nothing reaches the customer. The default window is 5 seconds
Two things to know:
  • Forwards can't be undone. A forwarded message sends immediately, with no window.
  • Stay on the page until the window passes. The reply is only sent once the countdown finishes, so if you close the tab or navigate away immediately after selecting Send, the reply may not go out.

Status, assignees, priority and tags

Email conversations use the same controls as the rest of your Inbox:
  • Status: move a conversation through your workflow as you would a chat or ticket.
  • Assignee: assign the conversation to an agent or a department.
  • Priority: flag conversations that need attention first.
  • Tags: categorise conversations for filtering and reporting.

Contacts

The sender of an incoming email is matched to your contacts, so an email conversation is tied to the same contact record as that person's other conversations. You can open the contact from the conversation to see their details and history.

 
People in this conversation

An email thread often involves more than the person who wrote to you, someone CC'd a colleague, or the customer looped in a teammate partway through.

Open the People in conversation panel on a conversation to see everyone on the thread in one list: who sent it, who it was addressed to, and anyone copied in.

People who are already in your contacts appear with their name. Anyone who isn't shows as an addable row, so you can bring them into your contacts without leaving the conversation.

To
add someone to your contacts:

1. Open the People in conversation panel on the conversation.
2. Find the person you want to add.
3. Select Add to contacts.

If a thread brought in several new people at once, use Select all to add them together rather than one at a time.

For someone already in your contacts, you can also:


  • Add note: write a note onto their contact record.
  • Compose new email: start a new email to them.
  • Create ticket: raise a ticket with them as the contact.
  • View in contacts: open their full contact record.

If a thread has a lot of people on it, use the search box at the top of the panel to narrow the list.
 

Replying to everyone on the thread


When more than one other person is on a thread, the composer also offers Reply All, which includes everyone who was on the original message.

If the customer wrote only to your inbox, Reply All is not shown. With just one other person on the thread it would send exactly what Reply sends, so it appears once there is someone else to include.
 

Assign an AI agent to your email inbox

You can put an AI agent on an email inbox, the same way you can for live chat and your other channels. The agent answers incoming email using the sources you've trained it on, and hands over to your team when it should.
  1. Click Automations on the left navigation bar.
  2. Open your AI agent's settings.
  3. Under its channels, select the email inbox you want it to handle.
An AI agent handles one inbox at a time, so if you run separate support and sales inboxes, you can give each its own agent with its own training and tone.
Note: replies an AI agent sends are subject to the same undo window as a human agent's, and appear in the conversation like any other reply, so your team can see exactly what the customer was told.
For more on training and tuning agents, see Getting started with AI Assist and Deploying multiple AI agents across support channels.

Coming soon

These are not available for email yet:
  • Signatures: automatic signatures appended to your replies.
  • Drafts: saved or shared reply drafts. A reply you have not sent is not preserved if you navigate away.
  • Per-conversation access control: today you control access at the inbox level; controlling it on an individual conversation is coming.

    Additional considerations

    • Replies come from the inbox's address In a property with several connected inboxes, the reply always goes out from the address belonging to that conversation's inbox. You do not choose the sending address per reply.
    • What "sent" means with undo send on Because the reply is genuinely held rather than recalled, a reply is not actually delivered until the countdown finishes. If a teammate reports sending something that never arrived, check whether they navigated away immediately after selecting Send.
    • Visibility follows the inbox Who can see and reply to an email conversation is determined by the visibility set on its inbox. See Updating your email inbox settings.

    Learn more


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