Email and SMS

Email and SMS bring customers who write to a support address or text a phone number into the same inbox as your chat channels. You connect your own providers: Resend for email and Twilio for SMS. Both pages are under the sidebar's existing-tools group, labeled Email and SMS.

Plan and access#

• Both channels need a plan at the Inbox tier or higher. On a lower plan the pages show an upgrade prompt, and saving settings is refused with a subscription-required error. See Plans and billing.
• Changing settings needs permission to manage settings. A read-only workspace cannot send.
• AI replies also need the AI add-on with credits and an assistant profile with a brand name. See How the AI works.

Set up email#

You need a Resend account with a verified sending domain and an address on that domain to receive mail.

1. In Resend, create an inbound webhook for the event email.received. Set its URL to https://jovial-bison-730.convex.site/webhooks/email, and copy the signing secret (it starts with whsec_).
2. In Sela, open Email ("Email Channel").
3. Fill in the fields:

1. Turn on Enable Email Channel and choose Save Changes.

Notes:

• The webhook signing secret is required before you can enable the channel. The message reads "The Resend webhook signing secret is required before enabling inbound email." A new setup also needs the API key ("Resend API key is required.").
• Secrets are stored encrypted. Saved values show "saved (leave empty to keep current)". Leave a field empty to keep it.
• A workspace has one inbound address. Addresses are matched case-insensitively.

Set up SMS#

You need a Twilio account and an SMS-capable phone number.

1. Open SMS ("SMS Channel").
2. Enter the Twilio Account SID, Auth Token and Phone Number. Use international format, for example +1234567890.
3. Optionally turn on Enable on save, then choose Save Credentials.
4. Copy the Inbound SMS Webhook URL shown on the page (it ends in /webhooks/sms).
5. In the Twilio Console open Phone Numbers, Active Numbers, select the number, and under Messaging paste the URL as the webhook with method HTTP POST.

The status card shows Connected or Not configured with the phone number. The SMS Enabled switch turns the channel on and off without removing credentials.

Inbound behavior#

Email. Sela finds your workspace from the recipient address and verifies the sender's signature. It reads only the text of the message: HTML is stripped and attachments are ignored. Sela keeps the message IDs and reply headers so a customer's reply joins the same conversation. If the headers are missing, threading is less exact but the mail is still delivered.

SMS. Sela finds your workspace from the number that received the text and verifies Twilio's signature. Only text is processed. Picture messages (MMS) are ignored.

Outbound behavior#

Sending is refused when the workspace is read-only, the channel is disabled or a key is missing.

SMS cost. SMS is billed per segment by your carrier. A segment holds up to 160 characters in the basic alphabet, and far fewer in Arabic or other non-Latin text (about 67 characters per segment). Arabic replies therefore cost more per message.

How the AI behaves#

• An inbound email or text starts a normal AI turn under the usual gate: AI Assist add-on, credits, assistant profile, open conversation and no human owner. Operators can reply directly at any time. See Conversation control.
• On SMS the AI aims for about 480 characters to keep segment cost down, and never offers attachments or buttons.
• On email the AI writes formatted text and never promises attachments.
• There is no channel-wide AI switch for email or SMS. To stop AI in one conversation, change its status in the inbox.
• Customers get a reply from your own address or number. The AI never answers under Sela's identity.

Limits#

Troubleshooting#

Email and SMS have no diagnostic screen. Failures are recorded in operational logs, so send Sela support the time and the address or number involved. For operator send errors with a reference, see Delivery troubleshooting.

The Gmail and Google Calendar connectors under Integrations are separate from the email channel. The Gmail connector only sends confirmations, reminders and follow-ups on your behalf and does not read your mailbox.