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Connecting a channel creates an inbox. Everything about how that inbox behaves afterwards lives here. Open Settings → Inboxes, click an inbox, and you get a row of tabs. Which tabs appear depends on the channel — a web chat inbox has seven, eight once your account’s agent-bots flag is on, and it can never reach nine. An SMS inbox has four tabs on a native number and five once it is connected through Twilio. This page covers all of them.

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Which tabs you see

An inbox connected to email through Google or Microsoft has no Configuration tab. The provider holds the mail settings, so there is nothing here to configure — reconnect the account instead if something is wrong.

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Settings

The general tab. Some fields are on every channel; most are not.

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On every inbox

What your team sees in the sidebar and in the conversation header. On web chat this is labelled Website Name.This is internal, with one exception. Your customers do not see it — unless you turn on Use inbox name and avatar for the bot below, in which case it becomes the name your bot replies under on web chat.Name inboxes after the route in, not the team: Support — Apple Messages ages better than Tier 1, because teams get reorganised and channels do not.
Read-only on this tab — there is no uploader, despite the name suggesting one.The image shown beside the inbox in the dashboard — the sidebar, the inbox list and the conversation header.
On most channels your customer never sees this image. It reaches a customer in exactly three places: the web chat widget, the CSAT survey page, and — where Use inbox name and avatar for the bot is on — as the bot’s avatar on web chat.
Everywhere else the brand image your customer sees belongs to the platform, and is set there:Use your real brand mark at a square aspect ratio regardless: it is what your team looks at all day, it is what web chat and the CSAT page show, and it is the fallback your bot replies under.
“Auto-send greeting messages when customers start a conversation and send their first message.”Note the second half of that sentence. The greeting fires after the customer’s first message, not when they open the widget — so it never talks to an empty room.With it on, you also set Channel greeting message (placeholder: “Acme Inc typically replies in a few hours.”).A greeting-only conversation is never billable, whatever happens next.
Attach a portal to this inbox — every inbox except voice. Once attached, agents can insert an article into a reply from the composer, and on web chat, the widget can also surface articles to the customer directly.

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Web chat only

The domain the widget runs on. Used for display and for the help-center link; it does not restrict where the widget can load — that is Allowed Domains, on the Configuration tab.
The two lines at the top of the widget before a conversation starts. Defaults are “Hi there !” and “We make it simple to connect with us…”.Rewrite both. The heading is the single most-read string in your widget, and the default reads like a default.
Drives the launcher and the customer’s own message bubbles. Pick the colour your site already uses for primary actions, not your logo colour — the widget should look like part of the page.
“This reply time will be displayed on the live chat widget.” Three choices, and only three:
  • In a few minutes
  • In a few hours
  • In a day
This is a displayed promise, not a measured one — nothing enforces it and nothing checks it against your actual response time. Set it to what you can honour on your worst day, not your best. If you want the real thing measured and escalated on, that is an SLA policy.
“Enable or disable email collect box on new conversation.”Asks an anonymous visitor for an email address at the start of the conversation so you can reply later if they leave. Distinct from the pre-chat form, which is a fuller form shown before the conversation opens at all — turn on one or the other, not both.
“Allow the end-users to send messages even after the conversation is resolved.”On: the customer can reply to a resolved thread and it reopens. Off: they must start a new one.Leave it on. Forcing a new conversation loses the context of what was just discussed, and a reopen inside 30 days voids the resolution and credits you — which is the honest outcome when the problem was not actually solved.
“Conversations will continue over email if the contact email address is available.”The customer closes the tab; your reply reaches them by email; their email reply lands back in the same thread. Needs an email address on the contact — so it works with the email collect box or a pre-chat form, and does nothing without one.
Four independent toggles:Turn off the file picker if you are in a regulated industry and do not want unsolicited documents arriving in a support queue.

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SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and API

“Enable or disable multiple conversations for the same contact in this inbox.”On: one contact has exactly one thread, forever — new messages always land in it. Off: a new message after a resolution starts a fresh conversation.On matches how these channels feel to the customer. A phone number is one continuous thread in their Messages app; splitting it into six conversations on your side is an internal artefact they never see and cannot understand when you reference it.The trade-off is reporting: with it on, one very long thread is a single conversation, so per-conversation metrics get coarser.

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Email and web chat

“Select the name shown to your customer when they receive emails from your agents.”A Friendly / Professional radio group, with a live preview of what the customer sees as you switch between them. Friendly sends as the person: Priya from Northwind. Professional sends as the company: Northwind Supply. An optional business-name input sets what the company side reads, if you want it to differ from the account name.Use Friendly when you want replies to feel personal and you are happy for customers to learn who handled it. Use Professional when your team rotates, agents use pseudonyms, or you do not want a customer replying directly to one person.

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Collaborators

Who works this inbox, and how conversations reach them.
“Add or remove agents from this inbox.”This is an access control, not a preference. An agent who is not on an inbox cannot see its conversations at all. Adding someone here is how you grant access to a channel; removing them revokes it.
“Enable or disable the automatic assignment of new conversations to the agents added to this inbox.”On: a new conversation is handed to an available agent immediately. Off: it lands unassigned and someone has to claim it.Off is the right choice when a specialist queue needs a human to triage before work is handed out. On is right almost everywhere else — an unassigned conversation has no owner, and the thing with no owner is the thing that ages.See Assignment policies for how the agent is chosen.
“Limit the maximum number of conversations from this inbox that can be auto assigned to an agent.”The ceiling on concurrent auto-assigned conversations per agent. Once an agent is at the limit, new conversations go to someone else — or wait, if everyone is at their limit.Set it deliberately. Too high and one agent silently accumulates a queue nobody can see; too low and conversations sit unassigned while agents idle. Start near what your team actually handles at once and adjust from the numbers rather than from intuition.

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Business Hours

Every channel except voice. Covered in full on Business hours — it is a bigger surface than one tab suggests, and it feeds SLA measurement and campaign timing as well as the widget.

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CSAT

“Automatically trigger CSAT surveys at the end of conversations to understand how customers feel about their support experience. Track satisfaction trends and identify areas for improvement over time.”
CSAT surveys are sent only once per conversation. So on an inbox with Lock to single conversation on, a contact with one permanent thread is surveyed once, ever. If you want recurring feedback on those channels, turn the lock off or drive the survey from a campaign instead.Resolving outside the channel’s messaging window sends nothing. On WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, resolving a conversation after its 24-hour window has lapsed does not send a survey at all — Tied logs an internal activity note instead, silently, with no error to flag it.
The survey rule is how you avoid surveying people you should not. Exclude conversations labelled spam, billing-dispute or outage and your score measures support quality rather than the weather. A negative CSAT response voids a billed resolution retroactively and credits you automatically, with no time limit and no claim to file. See CSAT.

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Pre Chat Form

Web chat only. Covered in full on Pre-chat form.

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Widget Builder

Web chat only. Covered in full on Widget builder.

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Configuration

The credentials and connection details. What is here depends entirely on the channel.
“Place this button inside your body tag.”The script tag carrying your own website token and base URL. Copy it from here rather than from documentation — the one in the docs is an illustration and will not connect to your account.
“Add wildcard or regular domains separated by commas (leave blank to allow all), e.g. *.tied.dev, tied.com.”Blank means the widget iframe can be embedded on any site. This sets the browser’s Content-Security-Policy frame-ancestors directive — it controls where the widget can be embedded as a page, not who can call the widget API with your token. Anyone who views your page source can still read the website token and call the API directly from elsewhere; identity verification, not this field, is what protects account data. Fill it in to stop casual embedding, but do not treat it as an access control.
Two separate toggles, and the difference matters:
  • Enable User Identity Validation — “With this key you can generate a secret token that can be used to verify the identity of your users.” Turns the mechanism on and gives you the key. Verified and unverified visitors are both still accepted.
  • Enforce User Identity Validation — “If enabled, requests that cannot be verified will be rejected.” Unverified visitors are turned away.
Enable first, verify your signing works, then enforce. Enforcing before your server is signing correctly locks out every customer at once.Without verification, a visitor can claim to be anyone — so the agent correctly refuses to discuss an account. See Identity verification.
“Use the inbox_identifier token shown here to authentication your API clients.”The identifier your server presents when it creates contacts and conversations on this inbox. See API channel.
Where Tied calls you when something happens on this inbox. API-inbox only — web chat’s Configuration tab has no webhook field; its equivalents are Messenger Script, Allowed Domains and User Identity Validation, above. Distinct from account-level webhooks, which fire for the whole account, and distinct from the callback URL on Twilio and LINE inboxes below — that one runs the other way, a URL you paste into the provider rather than one Tied calls.
“Start forwarding your emails to the following email address.”The address to forward your support mailbox to. Set the forwarding rule at your mail provider; Tied cannot create it for you.
For mailboxes not connected through Google or Microsoft. See IMAP and SMTP — including the ordering constraint that catches people out: “To enable SMTP, please configure IMAP.”
API Key — “This API Key is used for the integration with the WhatsApp APIs.”Webhook Verification Token — “This token is used to verify the authenticity of the webhook endpoint.”Sync Templates — “Manually sync message templates from WhatsApp to update your available templates.” Templates sync on their own; use this after approving a template at Meta when you do not want to wait. “It may take a couple of minutes to update.”An inbox connected by embedded signup shows Reconfigure instead, which reopens Meta’s flow. See WhatsApp and Templates.
A read-only callback URL — the address to paste into the provider’s own console (the Twilio console for a Twilio number, the LINE Developers console for a LINE Official Account) so it can reach Tied. It runs the opposite direction from the Webhook URL above: this is a URL you hand to the provider, not one Tied calls.It is not a credentials panel. The Account SID and Auth Token, or the Channel ID, secret and token, you supplied when connecting are not shown or editable here — this tab has nothing to rotate a credential with.Telegram has no Configuration tab at all. Its bot token is set once, at connection time, and there is nothing further to view or change on this page afterwards.

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Bot Configuration

Appears when agent bots are enabled on your account. Attaches a bot to this inbox and sets how it hands over. See Agent bots.

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Account Health

WhatsApp Cloud API inboxes only, and read-only — not WhatsApp connected through Twilio or 360dialog. Meta’s own view of your number:
Check this tab before you blame Tied for WhatsApp delivery problems. A dropped quality rating or a reduced messaging tier is imposed by Meta, shows here first, and no setting on the Tied side will work around it. See WhatsApp.

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Deleting an inbox

Deleting an inbox deletes its conversations and its messages along with it. Contacts survive, because they belong to the account rather than the inbox.
There is no undo. If you are disconnecting a channel temporarily, remove the credentials or take every agent off it instead — the history stays and you can reconnect.

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Next

Business hours

Availability, the out-of-hours message, and what it feeds.

Pre-chat form

What to ask before a conversation opens, and what it costs you.

Widget builder

Appearance, position and launcher for the web chat widget.

Channels

Connecting a new one.