Can you reply to website chats from your email?

How it works

1. A visitor writes in the chat on your site.
2. If nobody has the inbox open, TalkMerlin emails the members of that site who have alerts on. A chat assigned to someone emails only that person. A busy chat sends at most one email every 10 minutes.
3. You reply to the email from any mail app, writing above the line that says "Reply above this line".
4. TalkMerlin posts the text above that line in the chat, under your name. Quoted text, your signature and lines such as "Sent from my iPhone" are left out.
5. If the visitor is still on the page, they see your answer in the chat. If they have left and gave their email address, your replies reach them by email once you have been quiet for a minute. They can answer that email too, and it lands back in the same conversation.

Why email

Email is the one app almost everyone already checks. Eurostat found that 82% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU sent or received emails in 2025, the same share as used instant messaging. Visitors are not patient either: in HubSpot's research, 67% of consumers expect a support ticket to be resolved within 3 hours.

The bar set by big companies is not high. Paul Graham noted in Do Things That Don't Scale that founders' "standards for customer service have been set by the companies they've been customers of, which are mostly big ones." A reply within the hour, sent from the mail app on your phone, clears that bar.

When email beats an app

• You are not at a desk. Tradespeople, therapists, shop owners: you check email between jobs anyway.
• You do not want another app. Nothing to install and no new notifications to set up. Your mail app already works on every device you own.
• Several people share the load. Each member chooses whether they get alerts, and a chat assigned to someone emails only that person.
• The visitor has gone. Your answer still reaches them by email if they left their address.

The limits

• Text only. Files attached to your email reply are not posted in the chat. Send files from the inbox, up to 10 MB.
• Slower than live. Alerts arrive at most once every 10 minutes per chat, so a quick back-and-forth works better in the inbox.
• The right sender. The reply must come from the email address of a team member who can see that site. Replies from other addresses, and mail that fails the spam, virus or sender (DMARC) checks, are dropped without a bounce.
• Size. A reply is capped at 5,000 characters, and emails over about 150 KB, usually because of pasted images, bounce back to you.
• Missed chats. A chat with no reply after 5 minutes is marked missed, and owners get a missed-chat email. You can still answer it from that email.
• English emails. The emails TalkMerlin sends are in English for now, even when the chat window is in Polish.

Setting it up

Reply by email is on every plan, Free included. You turn alerts on or off for yourself in your profile. The features page shows the rest of the inbox, and live chat on a small website covers whether a chat is worth adding at all. Mobile apps and Slack are coming and are not live yet.