Hi there!
You can only receive email notifications about incoming messages when your chat is offline. You can enable the notifications in the Settings>Notifications section; you should provide an email address (or several) for that purpose.
The notification email itself includes available visitor data and their chat message to you; you can reply to their message by simply responding to that email notification. Your response will be sent to the email address the visitor has provided.
What’s important to remember: the email notifications are generated five minutes after a chat message arrives in your offline widget. Please note that if an operator switches their status to ‘online’ or pick up the conversation before the five-minute mark, the email notification will not be sent.
The five-minute delay has been added to ensure that your visitor’s entire message is included in the notification you receive (it’s very common for the visitors to send their inquiry in multiple chat messages instead of a single message). With the five-minute delay, you should have the full picture of the customer’s issue and you’ll be able to react effectively 🙂
If you’d like to learn more about Tidio’s offline status and how it works, please take a look at this article:
https://www.tidio.com/knowledge/getting-started/going-offline/
Let me know if there’s anything else we can do for you and have a Happy New Year!
