Email channel
How Ochre's email channel works: outbound delivery, threading, signatures, attachments, and what to expect on day one.
What you get
A real shared inbox on your own domain. Customers email support@yourdomain.com (or whatever address you pick), it lands as a conversation, your team replies, and the customer's email client threads it correctly. No "via Ochre" branding. No reply-to mangling.
Ochre's email channel is designed to be invisible to customers. They should not be able to tell that the email came from a help desk. Your domain, your name, your signature.
Outbound delivery
Outbound email is sent from your verified domain. Every message is signed with DKIM, and your SPF record authorizes our sending infrastructure. Together, that gets you reliable delivery to Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail without landing in spam.
DMARC alignment is enabled so big mail providers see the from-domain matching the signing domain. If you've set up a custom DMARC policy, that continues to work.
Setup lives at Settings → Domains. The full walkthrough is in Custom domain email.
Inbound delivery
Inbound email arrives via an MX record on a subdomain you control (typically inbox.yourdomain.com). Your customer-facing address can be anything: support@yourdomain.com, hello@yourdomain.com, etc. Those addresses route into the inbox subdomain, and Ochre routes them into the right workspace.
Inbound flow:
- Customer sends email to
support@yourdomain.com. - Your DNS routes the message to Ochre's inbound endpoint via Resend.
- We verify the webhook signature, dedupe by message ID, and create or update a conversation.
- The agent or AI picks it up in the inbox.
Threading uses the standard In-Reply-To and References headers. Replies to existing conversations land on the existing thread. Details in Inbound email and how receiving works.
Email blocklist
Senders or domains you don't want to hear from can be added to the email blocklist. Inbound messages from blocked senders are dropped at the webhook before any ingest or AI dispatch. See Email blocklist.
Signatures
Outbound replies use the workspace's signature configuration. The AI's outbound replies use the same signature path as a teammate's, with the author name set to the responding identity (a teammate name or the workspace AI name).
Attachments
Inbound attachments are accepted and stored alongside the conversation. Outbound replies can attach files. Inline images in HTML email render correctly in the inbox view.
HTML versus plain text
Inbound HTML email is rendered with a sanitized renderer that strips tracking pixels, remote content that hasn't been opted into, and inline scripts. Plain text email renders with auto-linking for URLs and email addresses.
Outbound email is sent as multipart with both an HTML version and a plain text alternative.
Multiple inboxes on one domain
You can run multiple addresses (support@, sales@, bugs@) into the same workspace, then route each into the right team with Routing rules on from_domain or subject_contains.
Forwarding from an existing inbox
You can keep your existing inbox and set up forwarding to your Ochre address. This works but loses some features (DKIM alignment from the original sender weakens, threading is more brittle). Pointing the MX record directly is the recommended path.
Auto-replies
You can configure an automatic acknowledgement on first inbound. Off by default. Configure in Auto-replies.
What's next
- Set up your domain: Custom domain email.
- Verify inbound is working: Inbound email and how receiving works.
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