Recipe — Send a confirmation email on inbound email
Atender doesn’t send case-received confirmation emails by default — this is intentional, because not every team wants to acknowledge every inbound message. If you do, an automation is how you opt in.
This recipe builds a rule that sends an Email Studio template back to the caller in the same language the email came in on.
What this rule does
- Trigger: A new inbound email lands in any of your inboxes.
- Action: Atender renders the Case Received Email Studio template in the inbox’s own language and sends it as a reply on the same conversation.
- Loop guard: Confirmations are sent for normal customer-created email conversations. Auto-submitted messages, mailing list or bulk messages, and auto-replies are skipped automatically by Atender’s built-in loop guard.
Build it
1. Create the template
If you don’t already have one, create the Case Received template in Email Studio with translations for every language your team operates in. The template typically includes:
- Acknowledgment of receipt
- The conversation’s human-readable ID (
{{conversation.human_id}}) - Expected response time
- A note that they can reply to the same email to add details
2. Create the automation
- 1 — Trigger —
Conversation created - 2 — Condition —
conversation.channel equals email - 3 — Branch —
Always - 4 — Action —
Send Email Studio template - 5 — Template — Case Received (pick by name or ID)
- 6 — Language strategy —
Match the inbox language
3. Throttle it (optional but recommended)
Atender’s built-in loop guard skips auto-submitted messages, list or bulk messages, and auto-replies before they can trigger confirmation loops. You can still throttle the rule to 1 per contact per 24 hours if you want to avoid sending repeated confirmations to the same person across multiple new cases in a short period.
4. Simulate before enabling
Run Simulate Execution against the last 7 days of inbound emails. Confirm the matches look right — normal customer-created email conversations should match, while agent replies, outbound communication, auto-submitted messages, list or bulk messages, and auto-replies should not. If the match list looks wrong, double-check the trigger is Conversation created (not Message received, which would also fire on subsequent customer replies).
5. Enable
Toggle the rule on. The next inbound email will receive a confirmation within seconds of arrival.
Verify it worked
Send a test email from a normal customer email address to one of your support inboxes. Within a few seconds, you should receive a reply with the confirmation template’s content, rendered in the language you sent in.
Open Manual Executions and confirm the action ran successfully. If you test with an auto-reply, mailing list, bulk message, or another message with auto-submitted headers, Atender should skip the confirmation automatically.
Variants
- Don’t confirm company-specific senders. Atender automatically handles RFC 3834 auto-response headers, so you do not need to filter common auto-reply headers yourself to avoid loops. Sender and domain filters are still useful for exclusions specific to your company, such as
contact.email not contains "@yourcompany.com". - Confirm only outside business hours. Set the rule’s Schedule restriction to Outside business hours. Pair with a separate in-hours rule that does in-line routing instead.
- Different templates by inbox. Use multiple branches:
If conversation.email_address = support@... → Send Support Confirmation; Else if = sales@... → Send Sales Confirmation; Else → Send Generic Confirmation.
Troubleshooting
-
Symptom: Confirmation goes out in English even though the customer wrote in another language. Fix: Check that the channel’s inbox language is set, and that the template has a translation for that language. The fallback is English when a translation is missing.
-
Symptom: Customer keeps getting confirmation emails on every reply. Fix: The trigger is Message received, not Conversation created. Switch the trigger.