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Connect an email account to a live chat

You can connect a live chat with an email account so that your email can become one of the channels you use to help your customers. Clients will write to your corporate email, and your customer support team will be able to respond to their requests right from the BRIX interface. Moreover, you will have access to the customer chat history in the system.

When you receive a new email, a new session appears in the Live Chats workspace. The email’s Subject is used as the session's name. You can also see the client’s name and email address. If the client has already written to your customer support before, the previous session reopens, and the new message is displayed within the same chat. To learn more, see Process incoming messages.

In live chats connected to emails, operators can initiate conversations with customers. Read more in Initiate a chat with an external user.

начало внимание

Only the users included in the Administrators group can integrate an email box with a live chat.

конец внимание

Connect an email

You can link one live chat with one email address. To do that, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Administration > Live Chats.
  2. Select a live chat from the list or create a new one by clicking +Live Chat in the top right corner.
  3. Go to the Messengers and Inbox tab and click the Inbox button.
  4. In the window that opens, select a tab:
  • Advanced. Settings allowing you to connect an email inbox using the SMTP and IMAP protocols, for example, to add an email address with a corporate domain.
  • Standard. Settings to connect popular email services. On this tab, you can simply specify the Service*, Login*, and Password* to the email inbox.

live_email_01

  1. Account settings.
  • Email*. Specify the email you want to connect to the live chat.
  • Service*. Select an email service from the list: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, or Office365.

If you are using an email with a corporate domain name, select Other and fill out the settings for connecting the SMTP and IMAP protocols.

  • Sign in with OAuth2. You can use OAuth2 to connect a mailbox to the live chat. You do not need to send the email password to ELMA365 in this case. It is enough to enter the email address in the Email* and Login* fields, then specify the email service and log in to it. This ensures easy integration and additional security of your account data.
    Authentication with OAuth2 is available if the company has configured a module for authentication in the email service. Read more in the Custom OAuth2 module for authentication via an external service article.

начало внимание

To enable the authentication via OAuth2 for mail connection, the system administrator needs to enable the enableLinesOauth2 feature flag. To learn more about this, see the Modify BRIX Enterprise parameters and Modify BRIX Standard parameters articles. If you are using the SaaS edition, please contact your BRIX sales rep to enable the flag.

конец внимание

  1. SMTP and IMAP settings.

In these blocks, the SMTP and IMAP server names are specified in the following format:

  • Protocol name.
  • Your domain or email provider separated by a period.
  • The connection port to use separated by a colon.

Examples: smtp.myserver.com:465 and imap.myserver.com:993.

The connection security settings that determine the numerical port are configured by the administrator who created the email address.

To configure the connection, fill in the fields:

  • SMTP server*. Specify the outgoing mail protocol settings, including the port, for example:
    • 25 for an unsecured connection.
    • 465 for a TLS-encrypted connection.
    • 587 for a STARTTLS-encrypted connection.
  • IMAP server*. Specify the incoming mail protocol settings, including the port, for example:
    • 143 for an unsecured connection and a STARTTLS-encrypted connection.
    • 993 for a connection with TLS encryption.
  • Connection protection. Select the data encryption method used by the server: STARTTLS or TLS. If no security is used, select No.
  • Login* and Password*. Enter the credentials for the SMTP or IMAP server being connected to. You can request these from the server administrator.

Please note that for some email services, you need to explicitly allow IMAP access to the email inbox in its settings.

Example of access settings for Gmail

 
To use Gmail, open the Google Account settings. Click Security in the left-hand side menu, find the How you sign in to Google section, and click 2‑Step Verification. Enable 2‑step verification, then move to the App passwords section. Enter the app name, for example, BRIX, and click Create. Use the generated password in the Connection Settings.
 
Read more about app passwords in Google Account Help in the Sign in with app passwords article.
  1. Signature settings.

In this section, write a signature that will be added to your messages in the live chat. Customers will see it in the emails they receive. You can skip this step and change the signature later.

  1. Click Connect.

If you do not use OAuth2 authentication, the connection to the mail server will be made automatically based on the data entered earlier.

If you use OAuth2, select the mail service you have specified in the settings from the list. In the opened window, log in to your account using your credentials.

If the connection with the server is established successfully, the email is automatically connected to the live chat. In the live chat settings, on the Messengers and Inbox tab, you will see the name and the status of the inbox you linked to this live chat.

inbox-2

To unbind the live chat from the inbox, click the inbox-3 button next to its name. The connection status will change from Active to Interrupted. You can later connect the email to the live chat again by clicking this button.

To the right of the activation button, you can see additional options:

  • Click inbox-4 to open the Connection Settings. Here you can change the email address linked to the live chat or edit the signature used in your emails.
  • Click inbox-5 to delete the inbox connected to the live chat.

Collect missed emails

If for some reason the live chat to which your email is connected is unavailable, accumulated messages will not always arrive after the connection is restored. Let's consider different scenarios.

Accumulated messages will arrive

Accumulated messages will not arrive
  1. If the mailer service responsible for sending emails from the system has restarted. For example, this could happen due to a network connection failure.
  1. If you disconnect your email from the live chat and then reconnect it after a while.
  1. If you changed your password in your email service. After this, the connection will be interrupted because the old password is specified in the email connection settings. To ensure that accumulated messages arrive in the system:
    1. Wait for the automatic reconnection attempts to complete, during which the live chat status will remain Active. If you change the password in the email connection settings during this period, messages will not arrive.
    2. When the live chat status changes to Error, go to the connection settings and enter the new password.
  1. If the root messenger service, which provides interaction with external chats and live chats, failed and then recovered.
  1. If you changed your password in the email service and updated it in the email connection settings before the live chat status changed to Error.

To understand why emails are not received in the live chat, we recommend collecting HAR logs from the mailer service for the period the connection was interrupted. Make sure automatic reconnection attempts are occurring.

 

You can also speed up the receipt of connection error notifications. To do this, in the mailer service configuration:

  • Reduce the reconnection check interval in the ELMA365_MAILER_DLM_CHECK_CONNECTIONS_SECONDS parameter.
  • Reduce the number of attempts in the ELMA365_MAILER_IMAP_MAX_RECONNECT_ATTEMPTS parameter.

 

 

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