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Connect Gmail

Connect a Google mailbox over OAuth so replies send from your real address and thread correctly.

2 min readUpdated August 2026
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Connecting a mailbox does two things forwarding cannot: replies send from your real address, and they thread into the customer's original conversation rather than starting a new one.

Connect

  1. Open Connections.
  2. On the Gmail card, choose Connect.
  3. Sign in to Google and grant access. A popup handles the whole flow.
  4. When it closes, Kognit runs a first sync immediately.

You can connect more than one mailbox — help@, orders@, and returns@ can all feed the same inbox, each labelled with the mailbox it arrived on.

What Kognit does with the connection

PermissionUsed for
Read messagesPulling unread mail into tickets
Modify messagesMarking a message read once it becomes a ticket
Send messagesSending agent replies from your address
Read profileIdentifying which address was connected

Kognit syncs unread mail. Once a message becomes a ticket it is marked read in Gmail, so the same message is never pulled twice. Mail you have already read before connecting is not imported — this is deliberate, so connecting an old mailbox does not create thousands of historical tickets.

Sync frequency

Connected mailboxes are checked about once a minute. You can also force a sync with Sync now on the Gmail card, which is useful right after connecting.

Replies

Replies to email tickets are sent through the connected mailbox, using the customer's original message headers so the reply threads properly. Your signature and any attachments are included.

If you have several mailboxes connected, the reply goes out from the one the ticket arrived on.

Tokens and reconnection

Google access tokens expire; Kognit refreshes them automatically using a stored refresh token, which is encrypted at rest. If Google invalidates the grant — a password change, an admin revoking third-party access, or the account leaving your Workspace org — syncing stops and the connection shows as needing attention.

Fix it by reconnecting: Connections → Gmail → Connect. Existing tickets are unaffected.

Disconnecting

Disconnecting removes the stored credentials and stops the sync. It also clears email tickets and email-sourced contacts created through that connection, so disconnect only if you mean to remove that history.

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