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Email Piping

Email piping lets you, your agents, and your users reply to chat messages via email.

Activation​

  • Go to Settings > Notifications > Email piping and enter your POP3/IMAP email server information.
  • Set the email address to use for the email piping in Settings > Notifications > SMTP. The email address must be the one to which the email piping server connects.
  • Chat24plus will send all emails from this email address and you, your agents, and your users will reply to this email address.

Information​

  • The setting Notifications > User email notifications must be enabled to send replies to the user email.
  • If you're using the Dialogflow App, and Settings > Dialogflow > Human takeover is active, no emails are sent if the chatbot knows the answer.
  • If the setting Convert all emails is active, all emails sent to your inbox will be converted to chat messages, including spam and promotional emails.
  • When Convert all emails is active, emails sent by email addresses of agents and admins are ignored; use another email address for testing.
  • When Convert all emails is active, each email sent directly to the email piping address generates a new user conversation.
  • You cannot use the same email address used for the email piping to reply. All your Chat24plus agents and admins must use a different email address.
  • Agents must reply via email from the same email address registered in Chat24plus.
  • When agents reply inside Chat24plus, emails are always sent to the user, even if user email notifications are disabled.
  • Emails are sent to agents only if they are offline. If they are online no emails are sent.
  • For Google Gmail and Google Workspace emails, replace your Google password with a Google app password. Enter imap.gmail.com as host and 993 as port.
  • Email piping requires the php5-imap module (IMAP module). If it's not installed on your server you can install it with the command apt-get install php5-imap. Contact your hosting/server support if you have issues.
  • The Delimiter option adds the text Please type your reply above this line. at the top of all emails. This tells Chat24plus to remove everything below that line to avoid duplicate messages. Activate it if you see duplicated messages in the chat. If this option is active, you and your users cannot use the string ### in the emails.
  • Email attachments are supported.
  • For email piping to work, email replies must contain the Chat24plus recipient's name. Example: Chat24plus | SB2457-4734 [email protected]. Major email clients like Outlook Web, Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail support this automatically.
  • Some email clients use custom formatting that may produce invalid text when converted to chat messages. The following clients are optimized: Outlook Web, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail.
  • Email piping supports departments. If the user's conversation is assigned to a department, the email notifications are sent only to the agents assigned to that department.

Cron job​

  • Chat24plus tries to process emails via cron jobs every 60 seconds.
  • You can trigger execution manually via API with the PHP function sb_email_piping(), or the WEB API function email-piping.
  • You can create a cron job that runs the URL https://chat24plus.com/include/api.php?piping=true. Use the command 
    */59 * * * * wget https://chat24plus.com/include/api.php?piping=true
    Replace the URL with your Chat24Plus installation URL when self-hosted.
  • You can also use the cron.php file provided in @files/cron.zip. The cron job command is php -f YOUR-FILE-PATH/cron.php.
  • If you manually run the cron job, enable Disable cron job to stop Chat24plus from triggering it automatically and to improve performance.
  • For the cloud version use https://chat24plus.com/script/include/api.php?piping=true&cloud=API-TOKEN replacing API-TOKEN with your API Token (https://chat24plus.com/account/?tab=installation).