Email and integrations

This page is for whoever sets up HappyToHelp for a team. It explains how to connect three kinds of outside service, all of them optional:

• Email, to send sign-in links, invitations and conversation notifications, and to receive customer emails as support conversations.
• GitHub, so your team and the AI can read and search repositories you choose.
• OpenAI for lead outreach, which drafts outreach emails for platform administrators to review and send. Most teams don't need this.

You switch each one on with environment variables and secrets. The full list, and how setup and deploy copy them to your installation (or to .dev.vars when you run it locally), is in Optional features and their settings. AI providers are set up there too.

Nothing is faked. If a feature needs a provider you haven't configured, it says the feature is unavailable. HappyToHelp never pretends to send mail or invents a provider's answer. Stand-in providers exist only in the automated tests.

A few words used on this page: a contact is a customer who writes to you; an operator is a member of your team who answers customers (the dashboard calls this role Agent); a workspace is one support space with its own inbox, settings and members. Setting names and API paths call a workspace a project.

Send email

Choose a provider

Set EMAIL_PROVIDER to pick a provider, then give it a key and a sender address. Optional features and their settings explains where these go. If you already use one of these providers, pick that one. Cloudflare Email Sending needs the Workers Paid plan.

EMAIL_FROM is the default sender. Each workspace can set its own sender on its Email settings page (Support Email From Address and Support Email From Name); mail sent for that workspace uses those instead.

Extra steps for Cloudflare Email Sending

1. Create a dedicated Cloudflare API token with the Email Sending: Edit permission and use it as EMAIL_API_KEY. Never reuse the token the installer uses to provision your Cloudflare resources. HappyToHelp sends through Cloudflare's REST API.
2. Make sure your account is on the Workers Paid plan, and onboard your sender domain to Email Sending, with the domain using Cloudflare DNS. Both are required to send mail to customers in general.

Cloudflare's inbound Email Routing and its free sending to verified destination addresses are separate capabilities from this.

What HappyToHelp sends

Once a provider is configured, all of these go through it:

• email sign-in links, password recovery, email verification and invitations;
• conversation notifications: an email to the assigned operator when a contact writes, and an email to the contact when someone replies (skipped while the contact has been active in the chat widget in the last 90 seconds). These are sent only when the workspace's email settings are enabled (Enable receiving email on the Email page);
• conversation transcripts that an operator chooses to email;
• reviewed lead emails (see Lead outreach).

What "sent" means

• Finishing email setup in the installer does not verify your domain and does not prove that mail arrives.
• A message marked sent means the provider accepted it (queued mail counts). It does not mean the message reached an inbox.
• Cloudflare's REST API reports an outcome for each recipient but no message ID, so for Cloudflare the stored provider ID is empty (null).

How HappyToHelp avoids duplicate emails

Every email has a delivery identity made from its recipient, content and sender. HappyToHelp keeps a record of each delivery in the sending, sent, failed or uncertain state.

A delivery is uncertain when HappyToHelp can't tell whether the provider accepted it, for example after a provider server error or a lost response. Uncertain deliveries are never repeated automatically, to avoid sending the same email twice; check with your provider before you try again.

Receive email

Customers can email your support address, and their replies to HappyToHelp's emails land back in the same conversation.

Set up an inbound address

1. On the workspace's Email settings page, enter a Receive Email Address and tick Enable receiving email. Any email sent to that address creates a support conversation. Use a plain address without a +; each address can belong to only one active workspace.
2. Route mail for that address to HappyToHelp in one of the three ways below. Your email routing must deliver that mailbox, or a catch-all, to the Worker.
3. Keep inbound mail on a dedicated subdomain, so your main domain's existing MX records stay unchanged.

Notification emails use a reply address of the form mailbox+conversationId@domain. When a contact replies to one, HappyToHelp adds the reply to that conversation, but only if the sender is that conversation's contact in that workspace.

The Email Worker and the SendGrid route read the MIME message and its HTML, store attachments in R2 and add the email to the conversation as a message from the contact. However it arrives, one email can carry up to 20 attachments of up to 20 MB each, and up to 100,000 characters of text.

Option 1: Cloudflare Email Worker

Point Cloudflare Email Routing for your inbound address (or a catch-all) at the HappyToHelp Worker. The Worker handles the email directly. It rejects messages larger than 25 MB.

Option 2: SendGrid Inbound Parse

1. Choose a long random value and set it as the INBOUND_EMAIL_TOKEN secret.
2. In SendGrid, set the Inbound Parse destination to https://<your HappyToHelp address>/api/integrations/email/sendgrid/inbound (the route is POST /api/integrations/email/sendgrid/inbound).
3. Send the token in an Authorization header, either as Bearer <token> or with Basic authentication, where the token is the password and the username is not checked. Use a ?token= query parameter only if your gateway cannot set an authorization header.

The route accepts requests up to 30 MB.

Option 3: Your own JSON gateway

If another service receives your mail, it can post each email as JSON to POST /api/integrations/email/inbound with the header Authorization: Bearer <INBOUND_EMAIL_TOKEN>.

• Required fields: messageId, to, from and text.
• Also forward the optional envelopeFrom, subject and headers (an object of header names to values). Without them, HappyToHelp can't tell when mail is automatic, and an out-of-office reply may be treated as a customer message (see the next section).

A new email gets HTTP 201; a repeat of one already received gets HTTP 200.

If processing an inbound email is interrupted, see Inbound email recovery.

Out-of-office replies, bounces and other automatic mail

HappyToHelp answers customers on its own, so it must never answer a machine: that could start an endless loop of auto-replies.

Mail that a machine generated is still added to the conversation and shown to your team like any other message, labelled automatic in the dashboard (hover over the label to see why). But it never gets an AI reply and never triggers a notification, either when it first arrives or when the scheduler later replays pending work.

What counts as automatic mail

A message is automatic if any of these are true:

• it has one of these headers marking it as automatic: Auto-Submitted, Precedence, X-Auto-Response-Suppress, List-Id, List-Unsubscribe, X-Autoreply or X-Autorespond;
• the sender is mailer-daemon or postmaster, or a no-reply or do-not-reply address;
• the return path is empty (a null sender);
• the subject starts with an autoresponder prefix such as Automatic reply:, Out of Office:, Undeliverable: or Delivery Status Notification.

A customer who merely uses those words in a sentence is still treated as a customer.

Other rules for incoming mail

• A null envelope sender is refused, not added. The Email Worker rejects it with Envelope sender required, and the SendGrid route returns HTTP 400. Bounces sent to a null return path are therefore refused.
• Who the contact is. For the Email Worker and the SendGrid route, only the envelope sender decides who the contact is; the From header never selects a contact. For your own JSON gateway, the from field (the sender your gateway authenticated) picks the contact; envelopeFrom is only used to classify the email.
• The first classification sticks. HappyToHelp decides whether a message is automatic, and saves that answer with its reasons and evidence, before it adds the message to the conversation. If the same email is delivered again, the first answer is kept.

Emails HappyToHelp sends are marked as automatic too

Conversation notifications sent through Resend or SendGrid carry Auto-Submitted (auto-replied for an AI reply, otherwise auto-generated) and X-Auto-Response-Suppress: All, so the recipient's autoresponder stays quiet. Notifications sent through Cloudflare Email Sending carry no custom headers until Cloudflare's list of allowed headers has been verified.

Details for developers

• The rules live in email-classification.ts. The saved evidence is bounded: the envelope sender, the header From, the subject and the Auto-Submitted, Precedence, X-Auto-Response-Suppress, List-Id, List-Unsubscribe, X-Autoreply/X-Autorespond, Return-Path and threading headers. All three ways in (the Email Worker, the SendGrid route and the JSON gateway) keep it.
• The classification, its reasons and the evidence are written to the inbound claim before admission (0104_inbound_email_classification.sql). For an automatic message, applyMessageEffects and scheduleInboundEffects request no AI reply and send no notification.
• The transcript API and the dashboard buckets expose message.origin ({channel:'email',automatic,reasons}). Owners and admins can read the stored evidence with GET /api/management/projects/:projectId/inbound-emails/:messageId.
• Message local IDs starting with email: are reserved for inbound emails, and POST /api/conversations/:id/messages refuses them. It also refuses erased: IDs, which contact erasure writes.

Check your sender domain's DNS records

Email providers expect SPF, DKIM and DMARC records on your sending domain. Workspace owners and admins can check that they exist with:

GET /api/management/projects/:projectId/email-settings/check-domain?selector=resend

• The check uses the domain of the workspace's saved sender address, so save one on the Email page first.
• selector is your DKIM selector. It depends on your provider; when you leave it out, resend is used.
• Each missing record is named. If a lookup fails, the result is "unknown", never a pass.
• This only checks that the records exist. It is not your provider's domain verification and does not prove that mail is delivered.

For developers: the check is checkSenderDomain(domain, resolver, dkimSelector), which looks up SPF, DKIM and DMARC TXT records with an injectable resolver.

Connect GitHub

Connecting GitHub lets your team and the AI read and search repositories you choose, to answer questions about your code.

Give HappyToHelp access

There are three ways. If a workspace has more than one, HappyToHelp uses the first that applies, in this order.

1. Connect with OAuth (from the dashboard).

   1. Create a GitHub OAuth app and set its callback URL to https://<your HappyToHelp address>/api/management/github/callback.
   2. Set GITHUB_CLIENT_ID, GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET and INTEGRATION_ENCRYPTION_KEY. The key is a base64-encoded 32-byte AES key (openssl rand -base64 32 makes one). Don't change it later without migrating the stored connections.
   3. As a workspace owner or admin, open the workspace's GitHub settings and click Connect GitHub. HappyToHelp asks GitHub for the repo and read:org scopes.

   Each connection request works once, expires after 10 minutes and is tied to you and the workspace. HappyToHelp stores the resulting token encrypted with AES-GCM, bound to the workspace.

2. A token per workspace: set GITHUB_TOKENS to a JSON map of project IDs to tokens.

3. One token for one workspace: set GITHUB_TOKEN, and set GITHUB_PROJECT_ID to the ID of the workspace it belongs to.

Tokens set with GITHUB_TOKENS or GITHUB_TOKEN can be any kind of token scoped to the workspace, including GitHub App installation tokens; HappyToHelp doesn't assume which kind it is.

Choose repositories and who can use them

• With OAuth, click Load repositories to list the connected GitHub user's repositories (the 100 most recently updated), then tick the ones to use.
• With a token, HappyToHelp doesn't list your account's repositories (GitHub App installation tokens can't use /user/repos). Instead it checks each repository in the workspace's saved list by reading it.

A workspace can select up to 50 repositories. Enter each repository’s owner and name separated by a slash. Under Access, choose separately whether operators (Allow agents) and customers (Allow contacts) may use them.

What the AI can and can't read

• Only the exact repositories you selected.
• Only bounded text files; binary and oversized files are refused.
• Never secret paths such as .env files, .git, SSH and cloud credential folders or private key files.
• Credentials found in file content (private keys, API tokens, passwords) are redacted.

For developers: a large file is read in chunks. Every chunk keeps the ref that was selected, and each later chunk passes the previous blob sha as expected_sha (a blob SHA is not a Git ref). If the file changes between chunks, the read fails and the caller starts again at offset zero.

Disconnect

Click Disconnect on the GitHub settings page. This removes the OAuth credentials and clears the workspace's repository selection and access settings.

Lead outreach

Platform administrators (users listed in the installation's platform_admins table) can have HappyToHelp draft outreach emails to potential customers. It needs OPENAI_API_KEY and an explicitly set LEAD_MODEL.

1. A queued job reads a bounded amount of text from the lead's public website and drafts an email grounded in that text.
2. You review the draft. A draft must be reviewed before it can be emailed.
3. You send it through your configured email provider.

Queued jobs pick up again after an interruption. If an attempt was interrupted after the call to OpenAI had started, it is marked uncertain and needs a person to check it. The usage reported for each attempt is recorded.

No payments or billing

HappyToHelp has no payments, checkout, Stripe integration, account balance or billing. For AI and training runs it keeps the raw usage your providers report and the budgets you set for each run, to help you diagnose problems and keep runs within bounds. Those records never create a charge or debit anyone's balance.

For developers: what the automated tests cover

tests/email-provider.mjs, tests/cloudflare-email.mjs, tests/email-worker.mjs, tests/email-classification.mjs, tests/email-recovery.mjs, tests/sendgrid-inbound.mjs, tests/sendgrid-email.mjs, tests/github-integration.mjs and tests/lead-operations.mjs exercise local storage and test-only stand-ins for the outside services. They don't prove live delivery by a provider, acceptance of a GitHub OAuth sign-in, provider costs or a working deployment.

Provider documentation this page follows

• Cloudflare, checked 17 September 2026: sending guide, REST response and errors.
• SendGrid, checked 20 September 2026: Mail Send API, Inbound Parse setup, parse webhook security.