Hi ​@TomW, It’s Mat from the Support Engineering Team

I completely understand where you’re coming from, and your request makes a lot of sense for teams who primarily use Intercom as a shared support inbox. It does seem surprising that this functionality isn’t available, especially given how similar Intercom’s Inbox is to traditional email clients in many respects.

Why This Might Be Challenging

Intercom's current design philosophy focuses more on managing conversations within its ecosystem rather than replicating traditional email workflows. While it can handle inbound emails and outbound messages, it’s not structured as a fully-fledged email client like Outlook or Gmail. This might explain why the functionality for mailto-style links isn't natively supported yet.

Workaround Suggestion

While this isn’t a perfect solution, you could use Intercom’s Inbox API to achieve something similar. Specifically, you can programmatically create messages with pre-filled recipient information and subject lines using the API. Here's a rough idea of how you could approach it:

1. Use the Admin Initiated Message Endpoint:
   The Intercom API allows you to send messages to users or leads. You’d need the email address of the recipient stored in your database to link this with Intercom.

   Example:

   POST https://api.intercom.io/messages  
   Authorization: Bearer <access_token>  
   Content-Type: application/json  
   
   {
     "message_type": "email",
     "subject": "Your pre-filled subject line",
     "body": "Your message body",
     "to": {
       "email": "example@domain.com"
     }
   }
   

2. Custom Button for Compose-Like Behavior:
   Create a custom button in your internal tool that leverages this API to simulate the behavior of opening a new message in Intercom. While this doesn’t directly launch the Intercom Inbox UI with pre-filled details, it automates the creation of the message.

3. Feedback to Intercom:
   Intercom might be more inclined to consider adding this feature if more users request it. You’re not alone in wanting better integration for initiating new conversations, so gathering and voicing this feedback collectively could help!

Bonus Tip for Mobile Users

For mobile, the lack of functionality to start a new conversation with arbitrary email addresses is indeed a limitation. If your team uses Intercom mobile frequently, consider creating a lightweight web-based form in your internal UI that pushes data to Intercom via the API as a stopgap measure.

You’re definitely not crazy, and your request is both valid and practical. Hopefully, Intercom will recognize its value and consider adding it to their roadmap! In the meantime, I hope these suggestions help streamline your workflow.

Best of luck, and feel free to share updates if you find other workarounds or hear back from Intercom!

​@TomW  I’m intrigued on many levels as an Intercom user, consultant and builder of integrations myself, what the main use case is for this -- is it mainly to have templated messages that you can kick off a conversation with a user or is there something specific about supporting the mailto: that is important for you?

If the use case could be solved via another method is that something of interest?

Would love to jump on a call to discuss and see what you are trying to accomplish, maybe there’s another way to get similar results or like ​@mateusz.leszkiewicz shared, it could be something built out with the API to do whatever you need and I could share more thoughts on this as well.  

Feel free to use my calendar link in my signature to connect, we can jump on a call and you can show me what you are trying to accomplish and why -- hopefully I can point you to a way to accomplish your goal in Intercom one way or another even if mailto isn’t technically supported. 

Where there’s a problem there’s often a solution it just may not be immediately obvious if it requires a new approach. 

Hope this helps!

It’s very simple, we have our own CRM that we use for managing our customers, but I want customer contact to happen in one place, which for now is Intercom. So if I see a customer in our CRM and want to start a conversation with them, instead of using a traditional mailto: link and open it up in my local email client, I want to link to intercom with the to= filled in with their name and email and have the posting form pop up on intercom, where I can either write an email ad-hoc, or choose from one of the intercom templates we’ve already setup, etc. 

Can’t believe this isn’t part of intercom, but I suppose I’ll just build a simple Safari extension to do this for me.

I’m not asking for a fully-fledged email client (though the Inbox does already act like an email client in almost every way). I’m simply asking for you to make it possible for us to directly link into Intercom to start a new message to a known email address, it’s that simple. 

There is no world where an API can help me workaround this basic missing UI flow.

The whole point of me using Intercom is to avoid having to build tooling for customer service. 

Does Intercom really want to give me an excuse to build customer service tooling, and eliminate Intercom?