Allow users to start or respond to chats via email

Sendbird Chat API/SDK API
1

Hello! I’m interested in generally how to integrate Sendbird with emails that my application sends out. Features I’m thinking of are:

  • Responding to an email placing the body of the email in a message in a chat conversation between two users
  • Sending emails when a chat message was sent while the recipient was offline

Can anyone point me to an example of such an integration, or start me in the right place in the docs? What other parts will need to be in place (i.e. a mail server) for this to work?

2

@kevinATfohANDboh,

Welcome to the Sendbird Community!

I believe you could potentially achieve something like what you’re looking to do however you would definitely have a lot of custom work involved. You’d likely need some sort of middleware server that processes the emails and associates them with channels based on your own criteria.

-Tyler

3

So Sendbird wouldn’t do any sending or receiving of emails, right? We use CloudMailin for something similar now.

4

That is correct. Sendbird would not handle any of the actually sending or receiving of emails. Your theoretical middleware server would either poll the inbox or similar and then use the Sendbird Platform API to send messages to the correlating channels.

-Tyler

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