Choosing an email option
Kareenos sends and receives email in three different ways. Here is which one you need, and why they are not interchangeable.
On this page
Kareenos can send and receive email in three different ways, and they are not interchangeable. Picking the wrong one is the most common setup mistake on the whole Connectors tab, so read this page before you configure anything.
The three options
| You want | Use | Whose mailbox it is |
|---|---|---|
| Agents to email results, links, confirmations and notifications out to customers | Transactional email | The organization, sending from an address you have verified |
| Agents to send from your company mail server, and to reply inside an existing email thread | An SMTP profile | The organization, using your own mail server |
| Agents to react when mail arrives in a shared inbox, such as support or orders | An IMAP profile | The organization, using your own mail server |
| An agent to read and answer one person's Gmail or Outlook mailbox on their behalf | A linked account | That individual person |
All four can be set up at the same time. They do not conflict, and an agent is told which one to use for which job.
How to choose
Ask two questions in order.
- Is this one person's mailbox, or the company's? If an agent is going to work through somebody's own inbox, replying as them and seeing what they see, that is a linked account. Everything else is an organization option.
- Is the agent sending out, or reacting to what comes in? Sending out to customers in volume is transactional email. Sending from a real company address, especially where the reply needs to land in the same thread, is an SMTP profile. Reacting to arriving mail is an IMAP profile.
A common shape for a support operation uses two of them together: an IMAP profile watching the shared support inbox so an agent wakes up when a customer writes, and an SMTP profile sending the reply from that same address so the customer sees one continuous conversation.
Tip
Transactional email and SMTP look similar and are not. Transactional email is built for volume and deliverability and sends from a verified address you own. An SMTP profile sends through your actual mail server, which is what you want when a human might later open the same thread in Outlook.
What each one needs from you
- Transactional email needs an account with a sending service, an API key limited to sending, and a verified sending address or an authenticated domain. See Transactional email.
- SMTP and IMAP profiles need the server address, port, username and password for a mailbox on your own mail server. See Email servers.
- Linked accounts need an administrator to register your organization's own Google or Microsoft app first, and then each person approves access to their own mailbox. See Google and Microsoft accounts.
If your mail is on Gmail or Microsoft 365
Both Google and Microsoft now steer businesses away from signing in to mail servers with a password, and Microsoft is actively withdrawing password based sending from business mailboxes. If your mail lives with either of them, prefer the linked account route, which uses their normal sign in screen and keeps working as they tighten those rules.
Use an SMTP or IMAP profile when your mail is somewhere else, such as a mail server you run yourself, a hosting provider's mailbox or an on premises Exchange server. Email servers covers the Gmail and Microsoft 365 settings anyway, along with what each provider requires before they will work.
Common mistakes
- Setting up transactional email and expecting agents to see replies. It sends, it does not receive. Watching an inbox is an IMAP profile.
- Linking one person's mailbox and treating it as the company address. When that person leaves, the connection leaves with them.
- Switching on an IMAP profile and expecting agents to work through the mail already sitting in the inbox. Watching starts from the moment you switch it on.
- Naming email profiles vaguely. Agents pick a profile by its name, so a profile called "profile 1" is a profile nobody can address reliably.