Email channel

Ansadesk can take inbound email and turn each message into a conversation in the same inbox your chat widget feeds. Your team answers email and chat side by side, and the AI features work on both.

How it works

Ansadesk exposes a provider-agnostic webhook at /api/email/inbound. You point your email provider's inbound parsing (Postmark, Amazon SES, Resend inbound, etc.) at it. When an email arrives, the provider POSTs the parsed message as JSON and Ansadesk creates or threads a conversation for you.

The webhook expects this shape:

POST /api/email/inbound
x-inbound-secret: <EMAIL_INBOUND_SECRET>
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "to": "[email protected]",
  "from": "[email protected]",
  "fromName": "Jane Doe",        // optional
  "subject": "Where's my order?", // optional
  "text": "Hi, I ordered last week and…"
}

Routing to a workspace

The local part of the recipient address is the workspace slug. An email to [email protected] lands in the workspace whose slug is acme. Give each workspace its own inbound address and you can run several workspaces on one inbound domain. Mail to an address whose local part doesn't match a workspace is rejected with a 404.

Threading & sender identity

• Email identity is stable: every message from the same from address maps to a single visitor, so an agent sees one person's history rather than a new contact each time.
• A new email threads into that sender's most recent open email conversation. If they have none open, a fresh conversation is created. Reopen a closed conversation by replying once it's closed and the next email starts a new thread.
• The subject is prepended to the body, and the combined text is stored as the visitor's message (capped at 4,000 characters).

AI works on email too

An inbound email is treated exactly like a widget message. If you've configured an AI knowledge base and an AI key, Ansadesk drafts a reply, and supervised autopilot and triage apply the same way they do on chat — high-confidence autopilot replies send, the rest become drafts with the usual unanswered-message alerts.

Setup

1. Set EMAIL_INBOUND_SECRET to a long random string on the server. Until it's set, the webhook returns 503 and the channel is off.
2. In your email provider, enable inbound parsing for your inbound domain (e.g. inbound.yourdomain.com) and configure the parse webhook to POST to /api/email/inbound with the x-inbound-secret header set to the same value. Requests with a missing or wrong secret get 401.
3. Map the JSON fields above. Most providers let you template the parsedto, from, subject, and plain text body into the request.