Bring Your Own Domain (BYOD) lets your AI Agent send and receive email from your own support email addresses. A single AI Agent can be configured with multiple email addresses — across the same domain (for example, support@company.com, billing@company.com) or across different domains (for example, support@company.de, help@brand.co.uk).
Each address you configure is represented as a separate email channel on the AI Agent. Channels are configured independently, can be filtered separately in Conversation View and Analytics, and can be referenced by routing logic in Playbooks, Actions, and Handoffs.
You configure a BYOD address in Config > CHANNELS > Email > Configuration on the Ada dashboard. After configuration, set up email forwarding from each BYOD address to your AI Agent’s Ada email address so inquiries reach the AI Agent.
Bring Your Own Domain helps you maintain brand consistency, route inquiries correctly, and consolidate operations across multiple support inboxes.
help@company.com) instead of a generic Ada address.support@company.fr, support@company.ch), brand-specific inboxes (help@brand-a.com, help@brand-b.com), or departmental inboxes (billing@company.com, tax@company.com) on a single AI Agent. Configuration, Knowledge, Actions, and Playbooks are shared across all channels.email_recipient_address meta variable in Playbooks, Actions, and Handoffs to branch logic based on which inbox the end user wrote to.Bring Your Own Domain supports the following configuration options.
The following table summarizes which settings are configurable per email channel and which apply globally to all email channels on the AI Agent.
Get your first email address configured in a few steps. To add additional addresses afterward, repeat the same flow for each one.
Configure each email address on your AI Agent as its own email channel.
You can use an address from your own email domain. To do so, get your IT team to go into your domain provider configuration settings to add three CNAME records and one TXT record.
To configure a domain:
On the Ada dashboard, go to Config > CHANNELS > Email, then click the Configuration tab.
Under Bring your own domain, enter the email address that uses your own domain (for example, help@company.com), then click Next. The CNAME and TXT records you need to activate the email address appear.
Coordinate with your IT team to get those records added to your domain. After they’ve been added, select the I’ve added these records check box, then click Verify. As soon as Ada receives verification status confirmation, your AI Agent displays the verified status on the dashboard, and you can proceed to set up email forwarding.
To make changes to a domain before completing the full BYOD setup, select the Trash icon next to the support email address to restart the Bring Your Own Domain configuration flow.
To support multiple regions, brands, or departments on the same AI Agent, add additional email addresses as separate email channels.
To add another email channel:
Each address you add appears in the email channels list and is independently configurable. The AI Agent will reply from whichever address the end user originally contacted.
The email channels list shows every configured address on the AI Agent, along with its verification status and launch state.
If your AI Agent uses the Zendesk SMTP Connector for handoffs, credentials are scoped to the BYOD domain — not to individual inboxes.
support@network.com and billing@network.com to one AI Agent only requires one SMTP setup.support@company.com to an AI Agent that already has support@network.com requires a fresh SMTP configuration for the company domain.To configure SMTP Connector for a new domain:
Zendesk SMTP Connector credentials are scoped per BYOD domain. If you have inboxes on different BYOD domains, configure SMTP separately for each domain. Inboxes on a domain without a configured SMTP entry fall back to the AI Agent’s default Zendesk SMTP routing — which only works for the default email channel address.
See Zendesk SMTP Connector for full setup steps.
When the AI Agent replies to an end user, it always sends from the same address the end user originally contacted. This applies to:
For example, if an end user writes to support@company.fr, the AI Agent and any subsequent human-agent replies all go out from support@company.fr — never from a different inbox on the same AI Agent.
Each email channel is filterable independently across the dashboard.
The email_recipient_address meta variable contains the original email address the end user wrote to. It is available at the start of every email conversation. Use it in Playbooks, Actions, and Handoffs to branch logic based on the inbox.
For example, route conversations on billing@company.com to a billing-specific Playbook, or send Handoffs from tax@company.com to a different human-agent queue.
For the full list of email-related meta variables, see Using Variables.
If you have active traffic over a configured email address, follow these steps closely.
To change a domain:
If you are bringing a net new domain, new DNS records will be generated for you. You will need to update the DNS records in your domain configuration settings to permit the AI Agent to respond to inquiries on behalf of this new domain.
If you are re-using the same domain, or using a different alias on the same domain, the initial DNS records will reappear and you won’t need to re-add them to your domain configuration settings.
Explore additional Email configuration options.
email_recipient_address meta variable in your AI Agent.