How Inbound Email Becomes a Conversation

When a customer emails your support address and it is forwarded to Convot, a series of steps happen automatically. Here is what each one does.

The inbound flow

1. Customer sends an email to your support address (e.g. [email protected]).
2. Your email provider forwards a copy to your Convot inbox address.
3. Convot receives the email via our inbound email processing. Spam and auto-replies are filtered at this step.
4. Contact matching - Convot looks for an existing contact with the sender’s email address. If one exists, the conversation is attached to that contact. If not, a new contact is created.
5. Conversation created - a new conversation opens in the shared inbox, with the email body as the first message. The conversation shows the original subject line as the title.
6. Agents reply - any agent can reply from the inbox. The reply is sent from your Convot email address (or your custom domain if configured).
7. Customer receives the reply as a normal email. The Reply-To header on Convot’s outgoing mail points back through Convot so the customer’s reply routes into the same conversation thread.

Threading

Convot uses email threading headers (In-Reply-To, References) to keep a customer’s follow-up emails in the same conversation, not creating a new one. When a customer replies to your email, their reply lands in the original conversation.

If a customer starts a brand-new email (not a reply), a new conversation is opened.

Contact matching

Convot matches inbound emails to contacts by the sender’s From address. If you have already identified a merchant via Convot.identify with the same email, their Shopify revenue and plan data are visible in the conversation sidebar.

Auto-replies and out-of-office messages

Convot automatically drops common auto-reply patterns (vacation responders, delivery receipts, no-reply addresses) so they do not create junk conversations. See Spam filtering for details.

Resolved conversations and re-opening

If a customer replies to a resolved conversation, the conversation automatically re-opens and moves back to the top of the inbox. Your team does not need to manually reopen it.

The conversation shows the forwarded email

Because Convot receives a forwarded copy rather than the original, the From address on the raw email is your forwarding provider’s. Convot extracts the original sender from the email headers so the contact in the conversation is the actual customer, not the forwarding address.

Next steps

• Quoted thread history - how previous email context is preserved in conversation replies.
• Custom email domain - send replies from your own domain.