Email Piping

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

Activation

To activate email piping:

1. Go to Settings > Notifications > Email piping and enter your POP3/IMAP email server information.
2. Set the email address to use for email piping in Settings > Notifications > SMTP.
   • The email address must be the one to which the email piping server connects.
   • Nulu Business will send all emails from this address, and replies will go to this address.

Information

• The email address in Settings > Notifications > SMTP > Sender email must match the one used by the email piping server.
• Enable Notifications > User email notifications to send replies to user emails.
• If using the Nulu Business Settings > NuluAI > Human takeover is active, no emails are sent if the chatbot knows the answer.
• If Convert all emails is active, all emails sent to your inbox will be converted to chat messages. Note that this includes spam and promotional emails.
• Emails from agent and admin email addresses will be ignored if Convert all emails is active. Use another email address for testing.
• Each email sent directly to the email piping address will generate a new user conversation.
• You cannot use the same email address for replying as the one used for email piping. Agents and admins must use different email addresses.
• Agents must reply from the email address registered in Nulu Business.
• When agents reply in Nulu Business, emails are always sent to the user, even if user email notifications are disabled.
• Emails are sent to agents only if they are offline. No emails are sent if they are online.
• For Google Gmail and Google Workspace emails, replace your Google password with a Google app password. Details can be found here (opens in a new tab) (Create & use App Passwords section). Use imap.gmail.com as the host and 993 as the port.
• Email piping requires the php5-imap module. If it's not installed, you can install it with apt-get install php5-imap. Contact your hosting/server support if you have issues.
• The Delimiter option adds text at the top of all emails: ### Please type your reply above this line ###. This text tells Nulu Business to delete all content below it to cut out reply quotes. Activate it if you see duplicated messages in the chat. If this option is active, you and your users cannot use the string ### in emails.
• Email attachments are supported.
• Email replies must contain the recipient's name, e.g., Nulu Business | SB2457-4734 <example@email.com>. All major email clients like Outlook Web, Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail support this by default.
• Due to the nature of emails, each email client uses personal codes, delimiters, and automatic strings. Some chat messages converted from emails may contain invalid texts. We are optimizing for as many email clients as possible. Currently, Outlook Web, Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail are optimized.
• Email piping supports departments. If the user's conversation is assigned to a department, email notifications are sent only to agents in that department.