Connect the mailbox your customers already write to — hello@yourbusiness.com — and their emails appear in Chats next to WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram, and in your team's Telegram group. You answer there; the reply leaves from your own address, lands in your mailbox's Sent folder and continues the customer's thread in their mail app. The AI can answer emails too, when you switch it on.

Connect it in two minutes:

1. Make an app password — a separate password your mail provider gives to one program. Your usual password does not work here, and an app password can be deleted at the provider at any time without changing your own.
   • Gmail and Google Workspace: turn on 2-Step Verification in your Google Account, then open myaccount.google.com/apppasswords, create a password and copy its 16 letters. In Google Workspace the administrator may have switched app passwords off — ask them.
   • Yandex: in Mail settings → Email clients allow access by IMAP, then in Yandex ID → Security → App passwords create a password for mail.
   • Mail.ru: Settings → Security → App passwords, with full access to mail. Mail.ru may ask for its paid plan before it allows IMAP.
   • Another provider (your hosting, Zoho, Yandex 360 or VK WorkSpace on your own domain): choose Other and enter the IMAP and SMTP server names your provider gives. Ports: 993 for IMAP, 465 or 587 for SMTP.
2. Integrations → Email → choose the provider, type the address and the app password → Connect mailbox. We sign in to read and to send — nothing is sent, read or marked while we check — and say plainly what went wrong if the provider refuses.
3. Send yourself an email from another address. Within a couple of minutes it is in Chats with the email icon and its subject in the header.

Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com (outlook.com, hotmail.com, live.com and company mailboxes on Microsoft) cannot be connected yet: Microsoft no longer accepts app passwords for mail. The card lists them and says so.

An alias (for example hello@ on your main Google account): enter the alias as the address and the main account as the login, with the main account's app password. Only letters addressed to the alias reach Chats; the rest of the main account's mail is never read into SIPmind. For replies to leave from the alias, add it under Gmail Settings, Accounts, «Send mail as».

«AI answers emails» is off when you connect. A business mailbox also gets mail from banks, suppliers and colleagues, so at first every email simply appears in Chats and in the team group, and a person answers. Switch it on in the Email card (or when connecting) and the AI answers new emails the way it answers chats, with your knowledge base, in a plain email with a greeting and a sign-off. What changes and what does not:

• Mail that was already in the inbox is never answered — not when you connect, and not when you switch the AI on. Only email that arrives afterwards. After a long break in checking, old unread mail is shown but not answered.
• Robots are never answered and not shown: auto-replies, «out of office», delivery failures, newsletters and mailing-list mail (an address that is a Google Group too — connect the mailbox your customers write to directly), and mail from your own mailbox.
• No-reply addresses — a form on your website, for example — are never answered, but the email is shown in Chats for a person: write to the customer at the address inside it.
• Limits: at most 3 AI replies to one sender per hour and 200 per mailbox per day. Every email the AI worked on counts, including a draft waiting for your approval. Mail beyond them waits for a person.
• The AI reads the new text of an email, not the quoted history under it, and never opens attachments. Attachments from confirmed senders are kept with the email in Chats (up to 5 files of 10 MB each); from an unconfirmed sender only their names are shown.

«Sender not confirmed». The address in an email's From line can be faked. Your mail provider checks every email it receives; when that check does not confirm the sender, Chats marks the thread Sender not confirmed. Such an email is never answered by the AI, is not attached to an existing customer card by its address, and the AI does not see that customer's history. Read it and decide yourself — a real customer writing from a misconfigured server looks the same. Replies always go to the address in From, never to a different «reply-to» address.

A mailbox on «Other (IMAP)». When you connect, SIPmind learns from the mail already in your inbox how your server marks confirmed senders. A server that does not mark them leaves every sender unconfirmed, so the AI answers none of them by itself; the Email card says so. Connecting a new, empty mailbox? Connect it again once some customer mail has arrived.

Reply from Chats, so the AI knows. Answer in Chats or by replying in the team Telegram group: the email goes out from your mailbox in the customer's thread, the AI sees what you wrote, and the conversation is held for you — the AI does not answer this customer's emails for 24 hours, or until you press Finish. A reply you send from your own mail program reaches the customer too, but SIPmind does not see it; the customer's next email usually quotes it. Email has no 24-hour window: you can answer an old email at any time. The paperclip attaches one file up to 10 MB.

If something stops working. The Email card shows the last successful check. Check failed means the mail server did not answer for a while — we try again by ourselves. Paused means the mailbox keeps refusing the sign-in, almost always because the app password was deleted or your account password changed (Google deletes all app passwords when the account password changes). Make a new app password and connect again: mail that arrived meanwhile still appears. The team group is told when a mailbox is paused.

Disconnect stops reading the mailbox and deletes its app password from SIPmind; emails already in Chats stay. The app password stays valid at your provider until you delete it there. One mailbox per account for now. The mobile app shows email threads from its next version; until then, answer them in the dashboard or in the team group. From code: POST /api/v1/channels/email.