How to add an AI chatbot to your support email

Email is where support goes to pile up. Customers write to support@yourdomain.com, the shared inbox fills faster than anyone can clear it, and response times slip while the same questions repeat.

Supportweave fixes that without taking the human out of the loop. Every inbound email lands in one shared inbox, flagged for a human the moment it arrives, with a desktop alert on arrival and an AI copilot that drafts the reply from your knowledge base. Your teammate reads the draft, edits anything that needs a person, and sends, and the reply goes back out under your From name on the same thread.

What you'll need

• A Supportweave workspace (set up during your demo)
• A trained chatbot whose knowledge the copilot can draft from
• Admin access to your mail provider (Google Workspace or Microsoft 365) for your support address

Step 1: Train your agent first

Before you connect email, give the copilot something to draft with. Crawl your site, upload your docs and policies, and add the FAQs you already get every day. A grounded knowledge base means suggested replies cite real sources instead of guessing, and the copilot flags what it can’t answer so a person picks it up. See the training guide for the full walkthrough.

Step 2: Connect the Email channel in Supportweave

In Supportweave, open your chatbot and go to its Channels tab, then pick Email. Channels are set per chatbot, so the mail flows to the agent whose knowledge you just trained.

Set the optional From name your customers will see on replies, for example ‘Acme Support’. This is what shows in their inbox, so replies read as your brand, not ours.

Click Connect Email. Supportweave shows you a hosted forwarding address, in the form ch-<channel id>@<ingest domain>. That address is where you point your support mailbox. Keep it open for the next step.

Step 3: Forward your support address to Supportweave

Now point your existing support address, like support@yourdomain.com, at the hosted address Supportweave gave you. You’re not migrating your mailbox, just auto-forwarding a copy of inbound mail into your shared inbox. A mailbox can only forward to an email address, which is exactly why the hosted address exists.

Google Workspace

For a single mailbox, open Gmail on that account and go to Settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP, add the Supportweave address as a forwarding address, and set incoming mail to forward to it. Gmail sends a confirmation email to prove you own the destination, and that confirmation lands right in your Supportweave inbox as a conversation, so you can grab the link and confirm without leaving the app.

To route mail for the whole team, an admin can instead add a routing rule in the Admin console under Apps → Google Workspace → Gmail → Routing, forwarding messages for your support address to the Supportweave address.

Microsoft 365

An admin can create an Exchange mail flow rule in the Exchange admin center that redirects messages sent to your support address to the Supportweave address. For a single shared mailbox, you can instead turn on mailbox forwarding in the mailbox’s settings and point it at the same address.

Whichever route you take, keep the setting named here rather than chasing the exact menu path, since these consoles move things around. For an advanced setup, each channel also exposes a raw JSON inbound webhook you can post mail to directly.

Step 4: Send a test email and watch it arrive

Send a real email to your support address from an outside account. Within moments it lands in your shared inbox as a new conversation, tagged Email, flagged as needing a human, and dropped into the wait queue with its true arrival time. If you’ve turned on desktop alerts, one fires the moment it shows up.

Open the conversation and the AI copilot has already drafted a grounded reply from your knowledge base. Edit anything you want, hit send, and it goes back out under your From name on the same email thread.

Take it further

• Every email is auto-tagged with intent, sentiment, and a lead score the moment it lands, so the queue sorts itself
• Repeat customers merge into one contact timeline, so you see their whole history across every channel
• The copilot writes a handoff summary, so whoever picks up a thread has the context without reading it top to bottom
• Turn on desktop alerts per browser from the inbox header or under Settings → Notifications
• Add WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, or Slack, and those chat channels answer with AI by default — each has its own AI replies toggle to go human-first like email whenever you want, all in the same shared inbox
• Want more that answers on its own? The web widget on your site and a voice phone line reply instantly and grounded too, no human in the loop

One inbox, one knowledge base, one team answering wherever your customers write from. See the email channel page, or book a demo and we’ll show you what it would do with your support inbox.