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Email conversations that arrive in Intercom are handled the same way as Messenger chats — OpenCX picks them up via webhook, generates an AI reply, and posts it back as the AI admin. The key difference is a longer initial processing delay and email-specific formatting.

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Pre-requisites

Connect your Intercom workspace first. The AI has nothing to respond to until the webhook is active — start with Connect Intercom and come back here.
  • Intercom connected and webhook active — see Connect Intercom.
  • Email channel configured in Intercom — your Intercom workspace must be receiving emails (via forwarding or a connected inbox).

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How conversations land in Intercom

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Setting up

1

Confirm email is routing to Intercom

Send a test email to the address Intercom is configured to receive. The conversation should appear in your Intercom inbox.
2

Confirm the AI processes the email

The AI should reply within approximately 30 seconds (email conversations have a longer initial delay). Check that the reply appears as a message from the AI admin.
3

Trigger a test handoff

Reply to the email thread with something like “I want to talk to a human.” The AI should hand off — you’ll see an internal handoff note and the conversation moved to your team’s queue.
4

Verify the rep reply loop

Pick up the handed-off conversation in your Intercom inbox. Reply as an agent — the message should land in the customer’s email inbox.
If the AI doesn’t reply to emails, confirm that the conversation is being assigned to the AI admin. Some Intercom routing rules may assign email conversations to a human team by default.

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What the rep sees

  • The conversation appears in their Intercom inbox as an email thread.
  • The full AI-to-customer transcript is already in the thread.
  • An internal handoff note with summary, sentiment, and language.
  • opencx_handed_off tag on the conversation for filtering views and reports.
  • Replies sent from the Intercom inbox land in the customer’s email inbox.

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Channel-specific details

OpenCX waits approximately 30 seconds after the first email message before processing — significantly longer than the 4-second wait for Messenger. This gives Intercom time to finalize the conversation, apply routing rules, and assign the conversation to the AI admin. Email delivery is asynchronous, so this delay does not affect the customer’s experience.
Emails initiated by Intercom outbound campaigns, automated sequences, or templates (where the source is not customer_initiated) are skipped. This prevents the AI from responding to your own email marketing.
Email attachments follow the same rules as Messenger: supported image types are downloaded and uploaded to OpenCX storage. PDFs, videos, and audio files are forwarded as placeholder text when Forward unsupported attachments is enabled in settings. Otherwise they are acknowledged but not processed.
Intercom handles email threading natively. When the AI replies, the response appears as a new message in the email thread. Quoted previous messages and signatures are managed by Intercom’s email formatting — OpenCX processes the latest message content only.

Web (Messenger)

Messenger conversation specifics on top of the shared setup.

Connect Intercom

Credentials, webhook, and admin selection.

Intercom overview

What else the Intercom integration covers.

Troubleshooting

AI not replying to emails, webhook errors, handoff not firing.