The inbox gives your team one shared place to handle customer requests, whether they arrive from the "Need human help?" button in the AI chat widget or by email. Setting it up takes two switches in Settings > Inbox: one for the inbox itself, one for the email channel.
If your plan does not include the inbox, this page shows an upgrade prompt instead of the settings below.
Turn on the inbox
- Go to Settings > Inbox.
- Click Enable inbox.
Once it is on, the page shows a Support inbox toggle at the top and a short summary of the flow: a "Need human help?" button appears in the AI chat widget, visitors submit their name, email, and question, and the request lands in your Inbox where the team can track status, assign it, and add internal notes.
Turn on the email channel
Email is a separate switch so you can run chat handoffs without opening an email address.
- On the same page, switch on Enable email inbox.
- Under Your inbox address, copy the address HelpBento generated for you (there is a Copy button). It looks like
acme-3f9a@inbound.helpbento.com: your company slug plus a random suffix, so it cannot be guessed and it stays the same even if you later change your slug. - In your existing mail provider, forward your public support address (for example
help@yourcompany.com) to that inbox address.
Every email that arrives becomes a conversation in the inbox. Attachments come through with the message (up to 10 files per email, 15 MB each), with images shown inline in the thread. When you reply from the inbox, the reply is emailed back to the customer, and their next reply lands in the same thread.
Switching on email also reveals three more sections on the page: the reply identity and signature, a sending-domain card, and spam filtering. Those are covered in the related articles below.
Human handoff while the inbox is off
At the bottom of the page, Human requests without the inbox lets you keep the "Need human help?" path without running an inbox. Enter one address in Send requests to and chat handoffs are emailed there instead of opening a conversation; reply to the email and it goes straight back to the customer. Leave it blank and the AI never offers to reach a human while the inbox is off.
Turn the inbox off
Switch Support inbox off and a Disable the inbox? dialog appears before anything changes. It spells out exactly what this workspace will lose:
- The "Need human help?" path is removed from your knowledge bases (or, if you set a fallback address, requests are emailed there instead), and the Inbox is hidden for your whole team.
- How many unread conversations are waiting, if any.
- Inbound email to your inbox address stops being received.
- Your configured sending domain stops being used for replies.
Click Disable inbox to confirm, or cancel to keep everything as it is. Turning the inbox back on later restores the same inbound address.