Connectors

A connector is your company's own channel to an external system: a mailbox, an SMS gateway, a messenger bot. Emails and messages go out to customers through it on the company's behalf, and the replies come back into the Leads section.

Where to find it

Open Administration → Integrations → Connectors. Cards are grouped by channel type.

A type may hold several connectors at once. For example, a salon runs Telegram for regulars and WhatsApp for people who arrived from maps.

How to connect a channel

1. Press "Configure" on the card you need.
2. Fill in the "Connection" section: server address, login, gateway key or bot token.
3. Enter an address or a phone number in the "Verification" section and press "Save and verify".
4. Wait for "Verification passed". The card turns to "Connected".

The status on the card shows the state of the channel:

Messages reach customers only through an enabled connector with the "Connected" status. If email or an SMS gateway is set up but none of them works, a warning listing the channels appears at the top of the tab. While sending to customers is on and no working connector exists, reports raise the "Communication channels are down" signal.

Passwords, keys and tokens are stored encrypted and are never shown again. On a saved connector the secret field is labelled "Leave empty to keep the current value".

The "Connector enabled" switch turns the channel off without deleting the settings: handy while you change the plan at your gateway.

How to receive requests from customers

A connector works both ways. Turn on "Receive incoming", and an email to the company mailbox or a message to the bot becomes a request in the Leads section, with the contact, the text and the channel it came from. From there the request follows the usual rules of Marketing: it is distributed between managers and converted into a customer.

Incoming data arrives in two ways:

• Email — every five minutes the system reads new messages. They are neither deleted nor marked as read, so the mailbox stays usable as before. The first poll takes the last twenty-four hours, after that only new mail.
• Messengers and external systems — the external system posts messages to the "Incoming address". It appears in the form once the connector is saved, is copied with the button next to it and is pasted into the settings of the external system. The address is unguessable, so there is no need to publish it.

If the external system asks for a verify token, it is the last part of the address — everything after the final slash.

A repeated delivery of the same message is recognised: it does not create a second request.

What happens when a channel breaks

External services do go silent, so every connector has a "Retries and alerts" section.

• "Attempts" — from 1 to 10, five by default.
• "Pause before the second attempt, sec" — five by default. Every following pause is twice as long.
• "Email admins when the channel breaks" — on by default. The letter arrives at most once an hour, so a dead gateway does not flood the inbox.

For example, with five attempts and a five-second pause the system retries 5, 10, 20 and 40 seconds after the first failure. If the gateway stays silent through the fifth attempt, the message gets the "Failed" status.

What went out and what came in is visible in the "Exchange log", opened with the list icon on the connector card. The log holds the date, direction, address, status and the number of attempts. A failed outgoing message gets a "Retry" button. The log is kept for 30 days: it is diagnostics, not an archive of correspondence.

Connector settings

What to fill in for each connector and how they differ.

Company email

A single connector covers both directions: SMTP sends the letters, IMAP collects the incoming ones.

In "Connection" fill in the SMTP host, port, login, password and sender address. Port 465 works over TLS, 587 over STARTTLS; gateways also accept 25 and 2525. "Sender name" is what the customer sees instead of the address: "Repair shop on Lenin Street", for example.

To receive mail, turn on "Receive incoming" and fill in the IMAP host — without it the setting is not saved. The default IMAP port is 993 and the folder is INBOX. The IMAP login and password can be left empty: the SMTP ones are used then.

Verification opens both connections and sends a letter to the address you entered.

We read the mailbox but never change it: letters are neither deleted nor marked as read — it stays your working mailbox, and we keep the progress on our side. That is also why POP3 is not supported: reading there is destructive, and a letter disappears from the server once downloaded. Everything POP3 is needed for, IMAP covers.

A letter larger than 2 MB is skipped and noted in the exchange log — otherwise a single archive of photos would hold up the rest of the mail.

sms.ru gateway

Only the api_id from your sms.ru account is needed. Fill in "Sender name" if the operator approved a sign for you; otherwise leave it empty and the message goes out from a shared number.

smsc.ru gateway

The account login and password from smsc.ru, plus an optional sender name.

SMS Aero

The email the account is registered to and the API key. "Sender sign" is required and has to be approved in the SMS Aero account; SMS Aero is filled in by default.

SMS gateway (HTTP)

The option for a gateway that is not on the list: you describe the request that sends a message yourself.

For example, https://gate.example.com/send?to={to}&text={text}&key={credential} sends the message with a GET request.

Verification of such a gateway asks for a phone number: the only way to check the credentials is a real send, and it costs one SMS.

Telegram bot

Create a bot with @BotFather and paste its token into "Bot token". "Default chat" is where notifications without an explicit recipient go.

The bot token is entered here only, once for the whole company. The messenger inbox ("Chat management → Channels") takes the token from here: once the connector is verified, press "Connect" there — the token is not asked for a second time.

A bot has a single incoming address, so either the inbox or the connector handles it:

• with the inbox connected, the connector stops receiving requests, and customers write into the Messenger;
• to collect requests in Leads, disconnect the bot in "Chat management" and turn on "Receive incoming" in the connector.

Changing the token drops the inbox connection: the webhook stayed with the previous bot. Connect the inbox again after the change.

WhatsApp Cloud API

You need the "Phone number ID" and a permanent access token from the Meta console; the API version is v21.0 by default.

To receive messages, paste the "Incoming address" into the settings of the Meta app and put the last part of that address into the verify token field.

An important WhatsApp limitation. Cloud API delivers free-form text only within 24 hours of the client's message. Outside that window only a template pre-approved by Meta gets through — an arbitrary notification comes back as an error even when the connector is verified and shows "Connected". The channel therefore works well for replies and confirmations inside a live conversation and is not suited to cold campaigns. Sending by approved templates is not supported yet.

Hardware agent

This connector has no fields: the "Configure" button opens the list of company agents. The agent is a program on the computer at the point of sale that drives the register, the receipt printer, the scales and the label printer. How to install and pair it is described in Integrations.

External system

Free-form HTTP exchange: the outgoing call is set up like the SMS gateway, and incoming data arrives at the "Incoming address".

In an incoming request the system reads message, text or comment as the text of the enquiry, phone or tel as the phone, email or mail as the email, and name, fio or title as the name. That is enough for a form on someone else's site to drop requests into Leads.

Verification sends nothing to anyone: the system checks that the address answers. If you do not need an outgoing URL, leave it empty and the connector will work for incoming data only.

Who works with this

The section is open to the administrator. Connectors are a sensitive setting, so creating, changing and deleting them is recorded in the action log.

In short

• A connector is a company channel: email, SMS, a messenger, hardware or your own system.
• Messages go out only through an enabled connector with the "Connected" status.
• Receiving incoming data turns emails and messages into requests in the Leads section.
• Retries, the letter to administrators and the exchange log are set per connector.
• The Telegram bot token is entered once in the connector, and the messenger inbox takes it from there.

Related components

• Integrations — add-ons from the catalogue, access keys and the hardware agent.
• Marketing — where accepted requests land.
• Messenger — conversations with customers in Telegram and WhatsApp.
• Automation — rules that send messages through these channels.