Your AI agent can now answer the support email you forward to Aide, not just draft replies for your team. Switch your support address on for an agent, and customer emails get a complete, grounded reply from the same agent knowledge, order tools and handoff rules as chat.
How it behaves
- Turning it on: set up forwarding under Channels › Email, then on the agent's page open "Where it answers" and switch your support address on. Once that agent is deployed, Aide answers new customer emails that nobody on your team has taken. The same agent can keep answering your website chat.
- Try it first: under Channels › Email, "How Aide answers" sets who gets Aide's replies on each address. In shadow, Aide writes each reply as a private note on the conversation (or a note saying it would hand off, with its draft) and sends nothing, so your team can compare. You can also answer only test senders (addresses, or @domain for everyone at it) or a share of conversations, where every email in a conversation is treated the same way; everyone else's emails get a private draft. Everyone is the default.
- A short wait before replying: Aide waits 30 seconds after a customer's email before answering (0 to 600, set per address), so a customer who sends two emails in a row gets one reply that answers both.
- Without an agent on the address: nothing changes. Emails go to your team, with a Copilot draft as before. A newly added address starts without an agent.
- What the reply looks like: it opens with the customer's first name when Aide knows it (from the email's sender name, or from your store's customer record when the email has none), answers in full paragraphs, and ends with the agent's signature (set on the agent's page; your team name when empty). Products, orders and tracking appear as text and links.
- Orders: Aide acts only on orders placed with the address the email came from. An order number or email typed into the message proves nothing. Someone writing from another address is asked to write from the one on the order. Order offers ask the customer to reply to confirm.
- Handing off: when Aide hands off, the customer gets one email with the handoff message from Handoff settings, and the conversation goes to your team the usual way. While AI replies are paused, Aide hands off without emailing.
- People come first: once a teammate is assigned or takes over, Aide stops replying on that thread.
- Never answered: bounces, auto-replies, mailing-list and bulk mail, no-reply senders, and mail from your own support address. If a thread gets three AI replies within an hour, Aide hands it to your team with an internal note instead of replying again.
- Billing: each email Aide sends counts as one AI reply, shown as "Aide Email" in usage. Handoff emails don't count.
For developers
- Usage events have a new channel,
aide_email. GETandPATCH /v1/email-mailboxes/{id}/settingsread and change a mailbox'srollout(mode:everyone,test_senders,percentageorshadow;testSenders;percentage) andquietPeriodSeconds, each with its source (defaultorinbox);resetlists paths to put back to the default.- An agent's entry points now give a mailbox's
rolloutinstead of null.