Email channel & email fallback for offline visitors
The email channel turns a plain support email address into a Helpin inbox. Customers email you; conversations arrive in Helpin; your replies go out as normal email from the thread — full history, routing, and AI included.
Receiving email: forwarding addresses
Helpin receives email via forwarding routes. Each route is an inbound address (for example support@inbox.helpin.ai or a custom-domain address) that forwards into a mailbox.
Set up in Settings → Inboxes & Routing → Email Forwarding:
Click Enable forwarding to create your first route.
Copy the generated inbound address.
Configure your existing support address (or a new one) to forward all mail to it.
Helpin sends a verification email; once received, the route is marked verified and mail starts flowing.
Each route can be bound to a mailbox, so email for a specific address lands in the right team inbox.
Manual forwarded email detection
When someone forwards an existing email thread into Helpin manually, detection can catch it even without a dedicated route:
Toggle manual forwarded email detection — enables the detector.
Minimum confidence — the matcher's confidence threshold (default 80). Forwarded threads detected above the threshold become conversations with the original participants and history preserved; below it, they are ignored to avoid false positives.
Email conversations in the inbox
An email conversation looks like any other:
The customer's email (with sanitized HTML rendering) appears in the thread, with quoted history collapsed.
Your replies are real emails from your sender address; delivery status (sent, delivered, opened, bounced) shows on each message.
Cc participants are tracked and can be included in replies.
If the customer is a CRM contact, the conversation links to them automatically.
Email fallback for offline visitors
Widget visitors sometimes leave before a human replies. Email fallback converts the chat conversation into an email thread so your reply still reaches them:
Configure in Settings → Chat Widget → Chat Features → Email notifications:
From name — the name shown on fallback emails.
Delay before sending — seconds after the latest team reply before Helpin emails it.
Send window — minutes; an unread reply older than this is not emailed.
Fallback emails use the workspace sender (or mailbox sender) and include a link back to the widget conversation.
The email copy emphasizes replying directly by email; the customer's email reply re-enters the same Helpin conversation.
Verifying delivery
Each email message shows its delivery state. Bounces and spam complaints surface on the message with the reason — common causes are unverified sending domains and hard-bounced addresses. See Custom sender addresses & domains to fix deliverability at the source.
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