Connecting Your Support Inbox to Gmail or Outlook
How mailbox connections bring email replies into the same conversation thread as your live chats, and who controls the connection.
Live chat and email support tend to live in separate tools even at businesses that use both heavily — a live-chat widget for the website, a shared inbox for email. Chat's mailbox connection closes that gap by pulling a connected Gmail or Outlook mailbox's replies into the same conversation thread the widget uses.
What a connected mailbox actually does
Once connected, an email exchange with a customer becomes part of the same conversation record as a widget chat would be — not a parallel system you have to check separately. The management endpoint lets an owner or admin list which mailboxes are currently connected and disconnect one. Managing this is restricted for a specific reason stated directly in the product: a connected mailbox decides who this workspace's outbound email looks like it came from. That's not a small thing to hand to just anyone — a connected mailbox is effectively sending on your business's behalf.
The connection flow
Connecting a mailbox goes through a standard OAuth flow — a connect route that starts the authorization with the provider (Gmail or Outlook), and a callback route that completes it once the user grants access. You're not handing Chat a password; you're granting it OAuth-scoped access to the mailbox, which is the same trust model as any other business email integration and lets the provider be the one enforcing what the connection can and can't do.
Who should set this up
Because managing mailbox connections is owner/admin-restricted and directly affects what your outbound email looks like to customers, treat it as an account-level decision rather than something an individual agent sets up for themselves. Pick the mailbox deliberately — typically a shared support address rather than someone's personal inbox — since every reply sent through the connection will carry that address's identity.
What this doesn't replace
A mailbox connection threads email replies into existing conversations; it's not a full email marketing or bulk-send tool, and it doesn't change how the widget itself works. If your team's main channel is still the widget, connecting a mailbox is worth doing primarily for the cases where a conversation naturally continues by email — a visitor who chatted, then followed up days later over email about the same issue — rather than as a replacement for the widget itself.