Email channel

Live chat and email in one inbox

Customers don't think in channels. Some open the chat widget; others email your support address - and until now those landed in two different places. ZChat can now take email too, so both arrive in the same queue your team already works from, and both stay in your own database.

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One place to answer

Emails arrive alongside the messages visitors leave when your team is offline, so agents work a single list instead of switching between a mailbox and a dashboard. Here's what happens to chats after hours.

Replies stay together

ZChat reads the standard email threading headers, so a customer's follow-up joins the conversation it belongs to rather than opening a second one an agent has to reconcile.

Your mail server, not ours

ZChat never signs in to a mailbox. Your own mail server hands each message over, so there is no third-party mail service sitting between you and your customers.

What this is - and what it isn't

It is email as a support channel. Mail sent to your support address becomes a conversation in ZChat, threaded, attributed to the sender, and answerable with the reply-by-email action your agents already use.

The free edition is not omnichannel. Email is the free channel beyond the website widget. WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, LINE and API inboxes are part of Premium, at $19 per agent per month, as are voice calls through your own Twilio number.

It is not a mailbox poller. ZChat doesn't hold your mail credentials or log in to check for new messages. Your mail server - Postfix, Exim, an internal relay, whatever you already run - passes the message to ZChat when it arrives.

Built for the things email actually does wrong

The failure modes that make email support painful, handled deliberately.

The problem	What ZChat does
Auto-reply loops	Out-of-office replies, bounces and mailing-list mail are recognised and dropped, so your support address and someone else's autoresponder can't answer each other forever.
Duplicate threads	Follow-ups are matched to the original conversation using the message's threading headers, including when a mail client omits some of them.
Forwarded threads	A reply is only added to a conversation when it comes from the same address as the original, so a forwarded thread can't be written into someone else's case.
Mail nobody notices	If you use webhooks, an arriving email raises a notification in Slack, Teams or Discord, so it isn't waiting unseen.
Spoofed requests	The channel is off until you set a shared secret, and messages without it are refused - an open endpoint would let anyone forge a request from any address.

Your server, end to end

Another channel, same database

Adding email doesn't add a vendor. The messages land in the same SQL Server database as your chats, on the server you run, subject to the retention and backup rules you already have. See where your data lives, or read self-hosted vs cloud.

Off by default

The email channel stays disabled until you deliberately enable it in your configuration.

Setup

The step-by-step instructions ship in the download's README, including the exact contract your mail server posts.

Does ZChat connect to my mailbox?

No. ZChat does not log in to a mailbox or poll for new mail. Your own mail server hands each message over to ZChat, so your mail stays under your control and there is no third-party mail service in the path.

Is this full omnichannel support?

Not on the free edition. Email is the free channel beyond the website widget. Premium, at $19 per agent per month, adds WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, LINE and API inboxes, and voice calls through your own Twilio number.

Do replies stay in the same conversation?

Yes. ZChat reads the standard email threading headers, so a customer's follow-up joins the conversation it belongs to instead of opening a duplicate. A reply is only attached when it comes from the same address as the original.

What stops an auto-reply loop?

ZChat recognises machine-generated mail - out-of-office autoresponders, bounces, and mailing list traffic - and stores nothing for them. That prevents your support address and someone else's autoresponder from replying to each other indefinitely.

Is the email channel on by default?

No. It stays switched off until you set a secret in your configuration, because an open inbound endpoint would let anyone forge a support request from any address. You turn it on deliberately when you are ready.

Self-hosted customer support software

Deploy live chat on your own terms, not on someone else's pricing model.

ZChat gives you the installable server, web dashboard, website widget, and desktop agent tools in one self-hosted product, with live chat free to run. Run it on infrastructure you trust and connect AI only if and how you want it.

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Deployment

Install on Windows or Linux, behind IIS or Nginx, in a VM, or in Docker if that fits your stack.

Commercial model

Live chat is free with unlimited agents. Only the optional AI assistant is billed, per agent per month.

AI Flexibility

Use Ollama locally or connect OpenAI and Anthropic with your own provider accounts.