Your customers can start a conversation with your AI Agent by writing an email to your chosen support address (new or existing, e.g., help@company.com). They can then converse back and forth with your AI Agent to get their issues resolved.
Email onboarding has the following constraints:
Your Email AI Agent can help you automate customer support through your existing email address.
Your AI Agent uses all of the content you’ve configured in Ada to automatically resolve your customers’ inquiries, and writes longer messages that are appropriate in email but not, for example, in web chat. It uses the subject of the email to add context to the customer’s inquiry, and can address multiple inquiries in a single email.
If your AI Agent can’t resolve the customer’s issue, it forwards the conversation to your support team, who can then assist using the agent platform you already have in place.
Like all conversations your AI Agent has, you can audit its email conversations, and then provide guidance to coach and improve the way it interacts with your customers, and its ability to resolve customer issues.
Email Handoffs define how your Email AI Agent escalates customer conversations to human agents or support systems. Different handoff paths shape key email behaviors. These include support address setup, threading, and platform-specific considerations.
Configuring handoffs is an essential part of the overall setup. For detailed guidance, see Email handoffs for a complete list of available Handoff options and their configuration blocks, and Handoff scenarios for recommendations on combining those methods in specific situations.
Curious about other handoff methods for Email and other channels? Check out the decision table for the full list of options.
Email conversations work a bit differently from other channels in your AI Agent.
Over email, your AI Agent’s messages always include:
If you don’t have an AI Agent name configured, the AI Agent will default to signing off with “Ada” as its name.
If you wish to make changes to the salutation or sign-off, or make other refinements to email content, use Custom Instructions for your emails with headers and footers.
Your AI Agent automatically replies to every email it receives, to ensure that 100% of your customer’s inquiries get a response. If your support team needs to send and receive emails to and from customers (i.e. for escalation), without your AI Agent sending replies, consider using a separate email address.
Each email thread is treated as a separate conversation in Ada, so it’s possible for a customer to have multiple simultaneous email threads with the AI agent. After 72 hours of inactivity from the customer in an email thread, your AI Agent considers the conversation to be over. If a customer sends a message after this period of inactivity, your AI Agent treats that inquiry as a new question, and create a new conversation for it. Context from the previous conversation does not carry over into the new conversation.
After 72 hours of inactivity, your AI Agent will analyze the conversation to determine whether it was automatically resolved.
In rare cases, email providers may fail to include the reference headers that Ada relies on to link incoming emails to active conversation. If this happens:
Changes to a subject line mid-conversation will not disrupt the thread. The AI Agent will continue responding in the same email thread, ensuring conversation continuity.
Your Email AI Agent supports replies to up to 25 total recipients across the To and CC fields (excluding the original sender). If the limit is exceeded, recipients in the To field are prioritized and excess CCs may be dropped. For full details on participant limits and how multi-party emails are handled, see Multiple participant conversations.
If the original sender of an email inquiry BCC’s someone in their email to the AI Agent, the AI Agent will only send a reply to the original sender.
If the BCC’d user replies all to the original sender’s message in the thread, the conversation becomes a multiple participant conversation and continues in the same thread.
Your AI Agent is able to respond to forwarded emails. Forwarded content, however, is inaccessible to the AI Agent and it will ask for clarification on the content the end user is referencing.
As a best practice, do not send mass marketing or newsletter emails from the support email address configured with your AI Agent. If you have and an end user replies to this email:
Your AI Agent uses two layers of protection to detect automatic replies from end users and prevent reply loops. These protections work automatically and require no configuration.
If an end user sends a follow-up, non-automated email after an auto-reply, the AI Agent re-engages with that new message.
The AI Agent detects automatic replies that include standard email headers:
Auto-Submitted with values auto-generated, auto-replied, or auto-notifiedX-Autoreply with the value yesPrecedence with the value auto_replyWhen detected, these messages are dropped and do not appear in the Conversations View. If the first message in a conversation is a header-detected auto-reply, no conversation is created. This prevents inaccurate billing and resolution reporting.
Many auto-reply emails do not include standard headers. The AI Agent uses AI-powered detection to identify these messages, including:
When an auto-reply or loop is detected:
v1.conversation.message, v1.conversation.ended) continue to fire normallyUnlike header-based detection, these messages remain visible in the Conversations View for auditing. A “Conversation Resolution Analysis” event appears in the Coaching UI, which AI Managers can expand to see the detection result (for example, “An auto reply was detected” or “The conversation is not progressing”). Reply loops are typically resolved within a few messages.
When your AI Agent replies to end users, it includes instructions to receiving mail servers to prevent automatic replies from being sent in response. These instructions work best with Microsoft Outlook and are not guaranteed to prevent automatic replies from other mail providers from being sent to your AI Agent.
An email conversation includes every message exchanged in an email thread between the AI Agent and an end user (and human agent if the conversation is handed off). Conversations follow these rules:
Get Email running with these essential steps. For detailed instructions, see Implementation & usage.
Add Knowledge so your AI Agent can answer questions.
Activate email in your AI Agent settings.
Set up a handoff to route Conversations to your support team.
Test your configuration with your Ada-provisioned email address.
Implement and launch your email channel.
Set up Email for your AI Agent by completing the following steps.
Setting up email in your AI Agent consists of a few steps:
Set up your AI Agent’s content. The very first thing you’ll need is to add Knowledge so your AI Agent can answer questions.
Once Knowledge is in place, expand your AI Agent’s capabilities with:
Next, configure availability rules for Actions, Playbooks, and Processes to implement access control when needed, while CSAT preferences let you gather customer feedback. Together, these features build on your knowledge base to make your AI Agent more personalized and robust, giving you a solid foundation before moving on to configuring the Email channel.
Activate email. Activating email doesn’t mean launching it right away - you just need to turn it on to start configuring it.
Set up a handoff. Handoffs to your support team work a little differently from other channels. Take some time to configure at least one handoff, so you can pass both conversations and attachments to your support team.
Test. Test your configurations with your Ada-provisioned email address, and fine tune them as necessary.
Implement and launch your email channel. When you’re ready to go live and have your AI Agent respond to customers, choose your method of implementation (bring your own domain, forwarding, API, or a combination of methods), and set it up.
If you want to control which emails get passed to your AI Agent, you can use your existing email provider to create forwarding rules after you have your custom email address set up.
Audit and coach. As your AI Agent has conversations over email with your customers, keep an eye on how they go, and continue to use Coaching to improve your AI Agent’s performance.
On the Ada dashboard, you can go to the Convos page to view all of your AI Agent’s Conversations, then apply a filter so it only displays email conversations for your review.
Explore the full set of Email capabilities and related configuration options.