Email Log

Email is the part of a helpdesk you can’t see happening. A confirmation goes out — or does it? A customer swears they replied — did the reply arrive? The Email Log is Helpie’s answer: a running record of every email it sends and receives, kept where you can check it in ten seconds.

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Where to Find It

The Email log tab sits in the strip at the top of every Helpie admin screen, alongside Dashboard, Knowledge Base, and the rest — and it stays there even in chatbot-only mode, when the ticket tabs are hidden. You can also reach it from Settings > Email (View the email log), and the new-ticket notification email links straight to it.

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What It Records

One row per email, in both directions:

Filters at the top narrow it by direction and status, so “show me everything that failed” is one dropdown away.

A failed row means WordPress couldn’t hand the email off for delivery — usually a mail configuration issue rather than a Helpie one. It’s your cue to check your SMTP plugin’s settings. And note the log is separate from anything your SMTP plugin records: this is Helpie’s own account of what it asked WordPress to send, which makes it a useful second witness when the two disagree.

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Why It Matters Most in Chatbot-Only Mode

If you run Helpie with the helpdesk switched off — chat widget on, ticket screens hidden — the log quietly becomes essential. Here’s why.

In that mode, chat escalations still create tickets and still send emails: the customer gets a confirmation, and you get a new-ticket notification with who, what, and their message. You handle the conversation from your own inbox. But your inbox only shows your half of the machinery. The Email Log shows the rest:

• Did the customer actually get their confirmation?
• Has the customer replied to the ticket in a way I haven’t seen?

The log page even reminds you of this when helpdesk mode is off — it, together with the notification email, is how escalations stay visible. The full picture of inbox mode is in Helpdesk Emails.

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The New-Ticket Notice

Whenever a ticket is created — from the portal, the chat widget, an unmatched inbound email, or the WooCommerce Support tab — Helpie can email your team about it. On the Settings > Email tab:

• The notice is on by default.
• Notification recipients takes a comma-separated list of addresses; leave it empty and it goes to the site admin email.
• The notice’s Reply-To is set to the customer’s address — so you can hit Reply in your mail app and your answer goes straight to them, person to person. (Which also means that reply won’t appear on the ticket thread; reply from the ticket screen if you want it recorded. See Helpdesk Emails.)

One deliberate exception: when an agent creates a ticket via the Add ticket screen, no notice is sent — you’d just be notifying yourself about the ticket you made. The customer still gets their one email. Details in Working with Tickets.

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Status Updates and Assignment Notices

Two more notifications live alongside the new-ticket notice on Settings > Email, and both show up in the log like everything else:

• Status updates (to the customer) — when an agent moves a ticket to a new status, the customer gets a short note with the new status and a link back to the conversation. This one is off by default: tickets often pass through a few statuses on the way to resolved, and each change is an email. Turn it on if your customers appreciate the play-by-play. Creating a ticket doesn’t count as a status change, so nobody gets two emails for one submission.
• Assignment notices (to the agent) — when a ticket is assigned or reassigned to an agent, they get an email with the subject, the customer, and a link straight to the ticket screen. This one is on by default, because an agent should hear about work landing on their desk. Assigning a ticket to yourself never sends one; you were there.

Both emails can be reworded in the Email templates section on the same tab, same as the others.

There’s one more customer-facing email you’ll see in the log: the ticket lookup link. When someone uses the portal’s “look up an existing ticket” form, Helpie mails a fresh magic link to the address the ticket was raised with. It carries the ticket number and the link and nothing else, because the lookup form is open to anyone and shouldn’t confirm what a ticket is about to whoever typed the address in. It’s editable like the rest.

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The Weekly Digest

One more email lives on Settings > Email, and this one goes to you rather than a customer: a once-a-week summary of what Helpie handled. It covers three things — how many conversations and tickets came through (and how many the assistant had to escalate or couldn’t answer), the questions people asked that your content didn’t cover (the same clusters you’ll find in the Content Prospector), and an estimate of what the week cost on your Anthropic API key. That last figure is estimated from token usage; your Anthropic invoice is the source of truth.

• The digest is off by default — turn it on when you’d like the weekly pulse.
• Digest recipient takes one address; leave it blank and it goes to the site admin email.
• A quiet week sends nothing. No conversations, no tickets, no spend means no email.

You don’t have to wait for the email, either. The same numbers live in a Helpie this week panel on your WordPress dashboard — the screen you land on when you log in to wp-admin — always covering the trailing seven days. Administrators only, since it includes the spend figure.

Every digest that sends shows up in the log like any other outbound email.

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Turning the Log Off

There’s a toggle on Settings > Email if you’d rather not keep the record. Emails still send normally either way — the toggle only gates the local log. While it’s off, the log page shows a warning that new sends aren’t being recorded, so a half-empty log never masquerades as a quiet helpdesk. We’d suggest leaving it on; it’s the kind of record you only miss when you need it.

If retention is on your mind, the log and everything else Helpie stores is covered in Privacy & Personal Information.