Email Channel (MailTrixy)

Overview

The Email channel brings your mailboxes into the Team Inbox next to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest — so a customer who emails and a customer who messages sit in the same queue, worked by the same team, with the same auto-reply, flows and campaigns.

Email is delivered by MailTrixy, a separate application that owns the actual mailbox connections. The split is deliberate:

WaDesk is the operator interface. MailTrixy is the email engine. WaDesk never stores your mailbox passwords and never talks IMAP or SMTP. It shows you the mail, and hands every reply back to MailTrixy to send. That means one system owns delivery, suppression and tracking — so you can never get duplicate sends or two sets of conflicting statistics.

What You Need First

• A running MailTrixy installation, reachable over the network from your WaDesk server.
• At least one mailbox already connected inside MailTrixy (Gmail, Outlook or plain IMAP/SMTP). Mailboxes are connected in MailTrixy, never in WaDesk.
• Platform-admin access to both applications, to exchange the shared secret.
• A plan with the Email feature enabled — see Enable Email on the plan. This is off by default and is the most common reason the channel appears to be missing.

How the Bridge Works

The two applications authenticate to each other with one shared secret, sent as a header on every request, in both directions. Traffic flows three ways:

• New mail arrives. MailTrixy discovers it and immediately pushes it to WaDesk, where it becomes an inbox thread.
• You reply. WaDesk hands the reply to MailTrixy, which performs the real SMTP send and keeps the threading headers correct, so both inboxes agree.
• You sync. WaDesk pulls mail from MailTrixy on demand — used to import history when you first link a mailbox, and to recover anything a live push missed.

Why sync matters. The live push only announces mail as it arrives. Mail already sitting in a mailbox when you link it is not announced, and a momentary network problem can drop a push. Sync covers both, and it is safe to run repeatedly — already-imported mail is recognised and skipped, never duplicated.

Step 1 — Configure MailTrixy

1. Sign in to MailTrixy as an administrator.
2. Go to Admin → Settings → Integrations.
3. Find the WaDesk card and turn its enable toggle on.
4. In WaDesk URL, enter the full address of your WaDesk installation, for example https://app.yourdomain.com — no trailing slash.
5. In Shared secret, enter a long random string. Generate one rather than inventing it — 32 characters or more of random hex is ideal. Copy it now; you will paste the identical value into WaDesk in the next step.
6. Save.

The secret is the only thing protecting this bridge. Anyone who holds it can read your mail and send as you. Use a long random value, store it in your password manager, and never reuse it elsewhere. It is stored encrypted at rest on both sides.

Step 2 — Connect from WaDesk

1. Sign in to WaDesk as a platform administrator.
2. Go to Admin → Add-ons and open the Connect MailTrixy card.
3. Enter the MailTrixy URL — the address of your MailTrixy install, e.g. https://mail.yourdomain.com.
4. Enter the same shared secret you set in MailTrixy. It must match exactly — watch for a trailing space if you pasted it.
5. Save, then use Test connection. A success means WaDesk reached MailTrixy and the secrets match. Anything else means one of the two values is wrong.
6. Turn on the Email channel toggle in Admin → Channel Settings.

Step 3 — Enable Email on the Plan

Email is plan-gated and ships off on every plan. Until you turn it on, users will see no Email option anywhere — no mailbox picker, no email sender, nothing — even though the bridge is connected correctly.

1. Go to Admin → Packages.
2. Edit each plan that should include email and tick Email.
3. Set the monthly email limit for that plan if you want to cap usage.

If the channel seems missing, check this first. A connected bridge with the plan flag off looks identical to a broken bridge from the user’s side.

Step 4 — The Matching-Email Rule

This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth reading carefully.

When a WaDesk user opens the mailbox picker, WaDesk asks MailTrixy which mailboxes belong to that person, identified by their login email address. MailTrixy returns a mailbox only when that address matches either:

• the MailTrixy user who connected the mailbox, or
• the owner of the MailTrixy workspace that holds it.

It is matched against the person’s login email, not the mailbox address. If sales@acme.com is connected in MailTrixy by a user who signs in as jane@acme.com, then the WaDesk user must also sign in as jane@acme.com. Signing in to WaDesk as sales@acme.com will show an empty picker.

This is what keeps tenants apart on a shared install: one customer can never see or link another customer’s mailboxes. To give a WaDesk user access to a mailbox, make sure they either sign in to MailTrixy with the same email address, or are added as an owner of the MailTrixy workspace that holds it.

Step 5 — Link a Mailbox

1. Sign in to WaDesk as the user whose email matches (see above).
2. Go to Devices and click Add, then choose Email.
3. The picker lists the mailboxes available to you. Choose one and link it.
4. WaDesk immediately imports that mailbox’s existing mail, so the inbox is populated rather than empty.
5. The mailbox now appears as a row in the device table, with its address, provider and connection status, alongside your WhatsApp numbers and other channels.

Link as many mailboxes as you need — each becomes its own row and its own sender.

One workspace per mailbox. A mailbox can be linked by only one workspace at a time, because inbound mail has to resolve to exactly one destination. A mailbox already linked elsewhere will not appear in the picker.

Syncing Mail

Each email row in the device table has a Sync action. Use it to:

• Pull history you want in WaDesk that predates the link.
• Recover anything a live push missed, for example during a network blip or a restart.

Sync remembers where it got to, so a repeat run only fetches what is new. It is safe to press as often as you like — mail already imported is recognised and skipped, so you will never get duplicate threads.

Using the Inbox

• One thread per email conversation. Threads carry the subject line and the sender, and sit alongside your other channels in the same queue.
• Reply from the inbox. Type a reply and send it — MailTrixy performs the real SMTP send and keeps the threading headers correct, so the customer sees a normal reply in their mail client.
• Assignment, notes and tags work exactly as they do on every other channel.

Quoted text is handled for you. An email reply usually carries the whole quoted thread beneath it. WaDesk strips that quoted history before matching keywords or capturing an answer, so automation reacts to what the person actually wrote — not to the conversation quoted underneath.

Auto-Reply, Flows & AI

• Auto-reply. Scope Welcome / Away / Out-of-hours / Keyword rules to a mailbox in Auto Reply.
• Flows. Set the Trigger node’s channel to Email in the Flow Builder. The email runtime executes message, media, buttons, ask, delay, condition, webhook, AI and end steps. Node types that have no meaning in email are deliberately hidden rather than shown and silently ignored.
• AI agent. Assign an agent to a mailbox for automatic replies with hand-off to a human.

Answering a button by email. Buttons in an email flow are rendered as a numbered list. A reply of 2, 2., Support or the copied line 2. Support all match the same option, because people reply to email in all of those ways.

Email Campaigns

Email campaigns are built in the same campaign builder as the rest of WaDesk. Choose Email in the channel picker, pick the sending mailbox, write your subject line and body, choose your audience and schedule, and launch.

Because it reuses the same engine, email inherits send now, scheduling, recurring sends, pause and resume without anything extra to learn. MailTrixy still owns delivery, so suppression and unsubscribes are respected centrally.

Troubleshooting