Run the agent on email — forward your support address to CoPhrase, and replies go out from your own domain, in the same thread.
Email is a channel like any other. The same agent, the same knowledge base, the same inbox — an inbound email becomes a thread, the agent replies, and a human can take over at any point.
How it works
CoPhrase gives you an inbound address. You forward support@yourcompany.com to it, and the agent answers.
That's the whole setup on the receiving side. You don't touch your MX records, you don't move your mail, and you don't hand over your mailbox — you add one forwarding rule in whatever mail provider you already use. Mail arriving at your support address is forwarded, parsed, threaded, and handed to the agent.
Replies go out from your address. Once you've added the DNS records for your sending domain, the agent's reply is sent as support@yourcompany.com — not as CoPhrase. Your customer sees your address in the From line, your address in the Reply-To line, and the thread stays where it belongs.
CoPhrase is invisible in the thread
The conversation is tracked in the message headers, not in the reply address — so there is no @cophrase.ai address anywhere in the exchange your customer sees. They hit reply, it goes to your support address, it forwards back to us, and it lands in the same thread. To them it is simply email with your company.
Deliverability is a real project. For replies to reach inboxes rather than spam folders, your sending domain needs proper authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). CoPhrase gives you the exact DNS records; you have to actually add them, and the agent won't send as your domain until they verify. Bounces and spam complaints are tracked and the offending addresses suppressed, because continuing to mail an address that bounced is how a sending domain's reputation dies.
Setup
Create the email channel
You get an inbound address. Treat it like a secret — anything sent to it reaches your inbox.
Verify your sending domain
Add the DNS records CoPhrase gives you for the domain you want replies sent from. Until these verify, replies fall back to a CoPhrase address rather than yours.
Forward your mail
Add a forwarding rule from support@yourcompany.com to your CoPhrase address. Or skip the forward entirely and publish the CoPhrase address directly — on a contact form, say.
Pick the agent
Choose which agent answers, and decide whether it replies directly or drafts for approval. Email is a channel where approval mode earns its keep early — an email reply is a written record in a way a chat message isn't.
Capabilities
| Official | Yes |
| Ban / restriction risk | None. Deliverability risk instead |
| Messaging window | None |
| Message length | No practical limit |
| Inbound attachments | Images and PDFs are read by the agent |
| Threading | Replies land back in the same conversation |
| Sends from | Your domain, once verified |
| Streaming replies | No — email is email |
Things to know
Email is slower, and that's fine
Nobody expects an email answered in four seconds. The agent can take its time, and a thread that sits for an hour awaiting a human isn't a failure state the way it would be in a live chat. Set your handoff expectations accordingly.
Multi-party threads. Email threads have CC lists. CoPhrase models an email thread as a conversation with multiple participants, each resolving to a contact — like a Discord channel, not like a one-to-one DM.
One person, two channels. A customer who emails you and later messages your WhatsApp is one contact, if the email address or phone number links them. Their qualification context carries across; their threads stay separate.
Signatures, quoted replies, and footers are noise in an email. They get stripped before the agent reads the message, so the agent isn't answering your own last reply back to you.
Auto-replies don't start conversations. Out-of-office bounces and vacation responders are recognised and filed, but the agent won't answer them — two robots politely emailing each other forever is not a feature.
Your Sent folder stays empty. Replies are sent by CoPhrase on your domain's behalf, so they live in your CoPhrase inbox, not in your mailbox's Sent items. If you need the thread to exist inside your real mailbox, that's what connected inboxes are for — below.
Connected inboxes — Gmail and Outlook
Coming soon
Connecting an existing Gmail or Outlook mailbox over OAuth is on the roadmap, not shipped.
Once it lands, you'll be able to authorize CoPhrase on a mailbox you already have. Mail arrives in your inbox as usual, CoPhrase reads it, and the agent's reply is sent from your address and filed in your Sent folder — so the whole thread lives in your real mailbox, not just in CoPhrase.
It's the right route when you want the conversation to exist in the mailbox your team already works out of. Until then, forwarding gets you the same agent, the same inbox, and replies from your own address — the thread simply lives in CoPhrase.