If you want customers to be able to contact you via email (e.g. support@yourcompanyname.com) and manage these emails in Intercom, you can set up automatic forwarding to your Intercom Inbox. This will let you handle all email support requests from one place, while making use of automations such as assigning to team inboxes, applying SLAs, etc.
Before you get started
Admin access to your email provider and domain settings are required for automatic forwarding and domain setup. Invite your admin to Intercom.
Automatic forwarding is a feature that is found in almost all email providers. However, email providers have different settings and capabilities that can affect, for example, whether or not spam is filtered out before emails are forwarded, or how many emails can be forward per day. Below we outline some guidance for setting up automatic forwarding with some major email providers, but we recommend reading the documentation for your email provider before getting started.
Avoid using mailing lists for email forwarding: Mailing lists, such as Google Groups, are not suitable for forwarding emails to Intercom. These platforms often modify the “From” address in the email header, which prevents correctly associating the email with the right contact in Intercom. This is designed to protect against user impersonation.
Set up automatic email forwarding
You can set up multiple email addresses for forwarding into Intercom. After setting up the first address, simply repeat the process for any additional addresses. Keep in mind the following limits:
You can add up to 10 unverified email addresses at a time.
A maximum of 250 email addresses can be added to your Intercom workspace.
Automatic email forwarding can be set up when adding a new email address to Intercom:
Go to Settings > Email > Domains & addresses and select New email address.
Ensure "Automatically forward emails from this address" is enabled.
Copy your workspace email provided.
Follow the steps to set up email forwarding for your email provider (see below).
Verify automatic forwarding.
Finishing setting up your email address in Intercom.
Or, when editing an email address you've already added in Intercom:
Go to Settings > Email > Domains & addresses and select Edit next to the email address you've added.
Then click Set up automatic forwarding.
Copy your workspace email provided.
Follow the steps to set up email forwarding for your email provider (see below).
Verify automatic forwarding.
After successfully setting up automatic email forwarding, the next step is to authenticate your domain if it hasn’t already been authenticated.
Note:
Your domain or email provider may require you verify ownership of the forwarding address. Typically, they send a verification email which can be found in your unassigned inbox.
Verifying your automatic forwarding setup is an essential step and cannot be skipped, it confirms that you own the forwarding address necessary for security and helps maintain your domain reputation by preventing bounces.
When you forward your email into Intercom, every member of your team will be able to see any emails sent to you. As a result, if you have private emails you don't want visible in Intercom it's not advisable to forward emails from your personal address.
Email provider instructions
Refer to the instructions for your email provider below to begin forwarding email to Intercom.
Configure email forwarding in Google Workspace
This approach is recommended for forwarding from Google because it doesn’t have rate limits or require a mailbox to be created. You’ll need administrator access to set it up.
Provider instructions:
Step by step instructions:
Log into your Google Workspace Admin Console by visiting https://admin.google.com/ and signing in with your admin credentials.
In your admin dashboard, select Apps, then select Gmail.
On the Gmail settings page, locate the "Default Routing" section and select Configure to create a new routing rule.
In the "Add Setting" modal (Step 1), specify the envelope recipient. Enter the support email address your customers use to contact you such as support@yourcompany.com in the email address field.
Scroll down to the "Envelope Recipient" section. Choose Change Envelope Recipient, then select Replace Recipient. In the Replace Recipient field, paste your Intercom forwarding address that you copied from Intercom’s email forwarding instructions.
Save your changes and exit the Google Workspace Admin Console.
Return to Intercom and select Verify automatic forwarding.
Configure email forwarding in Microsoft 365
Provider instructions:
Step by step instructions:
Log into your Microsoft 365 Admin Center by visiting https://admin.microsoft.com/ and signing in with your admin credentials.
Select the mailbox that you wish to configure forwarding for:
Shared mailbox: On the admin center homepage, go to the Teams & groups > Shared mailboxes page. Select the mailbox, then select Edit in the "Email forwarding" section.
User: On the admin center homepage, go to the Users > Active users page. Select the user, then the mail tab and select Manage email forwarding in the "Email forwarding" section.
On the "Shared mailbox" email forwarding side panel, select the "Forward all email sent to this mailbox" checkbox.
Then enter your Intercom forwarding address that you copied from Intercom’s email forwarding instructions and select Save and exit the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
Return to Intercom and select Verify automatic forwarding.
Note: Automatic forwarding needs to be enabled in your anti-spam outbound policy before trying to verify your forwarding setup. This is found in the Microsoft Defender portal.
Configure email forwarding in other providers
These methods are suitable for low volume forwarding only. Rate limits could result in messages being slowed or the account being denylisted if they are exceeded.
Provider instructions:
Note:
Google limits the number of Gmail messages users can send per day, and the number of recipients per message.
Using the email forwarding setting with Outlook will forward the emails as if you are the original sender. You should use the redirect option instead which will preserve the original sender.
FAQs and troubleshooting email forwarding issues
My email forwarding suddenly stopped working
My email forwarding suddenly stopped working
If your email forwarding stops working completely, likely someone in your company has disabled the forwarding in the email provider of the forwarding address. The first step here is to log into the email provider and check that you have Intercom's default email address added to your email forwarding settings for your external email client and that the forwarding has been enabled.
If your email forwarding is correctly enabled, check if any filters or restrictions have been created in the forwarding setup of your email provider which could block emails from being forwarded to Intercom, e.g. only forward emails with a specific Subject line or with keywords.
If you're still having issues with your specific email provider, we suggest reaching out to your provider or email administrator, or checking the Intercom Community for similar reports.
Missing some forwarded emails
Missing some forwarded emails
If you have email forwarding enabled and notice that some emails cannot be found within your Intercom Inbox, there's a few things to check here:
Use the Inbox search in case the email got assigned to a specific team or teammate.
Check if the email went to spam in your email client. If it did, it will not be automatically forwarded. Email clients do not forward an email when you click "not spam". You will need to manually forward this to Intercom.
Next, check your Intercom spam folder. Intercom has built-in spam filtering in addition to that provided by your email client. If you’re missing messages that you think have been incorrectly filtered, you can check for them in the Spam Inbox.
To remove spam emails from this spam folder, you can press "not spam" on these messages, which will bring them back to the normal inbox.
Check the size of the email in your email client. Intercom has a 20MB limit on incoming email content. Any email larger than 20MB will be rejected. - This limit includes attachments.
The last action is to check if a forwarding event actually happened for the specific email. You will need your email administrator to check this for you.
If you have proof of forwarding and the email does not appear in Intercom, speak to our Support team and provide the following info:
Subject line of the missing email.
Timestamp the email was received at.
The email address of the user and the email address it was sent to.
The users email is not being added as a participant to the conversation
The users email is not being added as a participant to the conversation
There are a few cases where this can happen:
If you manually forwarded an email to Intercom, then the address that did the forward action will be picked up as the sender of the email. You can prevent this from happening by enabling the end-user detection in forwarded emails. To enable this, go to Settings > Email > Email settings and scroll down to the "Detect customers in forwarded emails" setting to toggle this on.
This issue can also happen if you set up your email forwarding through Google Groups or another mailing list provider, which is not supported.
The original user is not added as the participant in the conversation when an email generated from a contact form
The original user is not added as the participant in the conversation when an email generated from a contact form
Intercom uses the "From" field of an email to identify the sender of an email and adds them as a participant to the conversation.
Sometimes, with contact forms or some email forwarding configurations, the sender may be changed to the account doing the forwarding, instead of the original sender (or the email entered into the contact form).
Rather than forwarding your completed contact forms via email forwarding, we recommend using our REST API to create conversations directly in Intercom when the form has been completed.
Can I forward email to an individual teammate in Intercom instead of the workspace address?
Can I forward email to an individual teammate in Intercom instead of the workspace address?
Yes, you can also automatically forward email to a specific teammate in Intercom. To do this, copy the unique email address listed on their teammate profile (you can access a teammate's profile by clicking on their name from Settings > Workspace > Teammates).
How do I disable email forwarding to Intercom?
How do I disable email forwarding to Intercom?
If you wish to disconnect your email forwarding from Intercom, you need to disable the email forwarding in your email provider's settings.
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