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Intercom's workspace review process

How our workspace review process works for outbound email sending.

Damon Foster avatar
Written by Damon Foster
Updated this week

You have likely been directed here because your workspace is currently awaiting email approval from the Intercom team. This is a standard process we do for new email senders. While waiting for approval, you will not be able to invite new teammates to your workspace or send outbound emails to your users.

For most senders, the review process is completed in one to two working days.

Important: If the review process for your workspace takes longer than two days, please reach out to our team via the Messenger and they will assist in the review.


What do we look for?

We want to make sure that all messages sent on the Intercom platform follow our email sending guidelines.

  • We review your recent messages to check that email is only sent to users who have given permission.

  • We check the open, bounce and spam complaint rates of your recent messages. A healthy sender has bounce rates between 0 and 3% and spam complaint rates of approximately 0.02%. If we see poor performance here, your workspace may get flagged for review. If you have failed the review process due to your email sending stats, you can find an overview of the issues across all your emails in the email deliverability report.

  • We observe the websites where the Intercom javascript snippet is installed to see if they render and that your messages are related to it in some way. 

  • We look at the email addresses for your teammates. Workspaces where admins use disposable email addresses (Mailinator, Guerrilla Mail, etc.) or personal email addresses (Gmail, AOL, etc.) may also be flagged for lack of available information.

  • We send a HEAD request to all links included in outbound emails to check them with Google Safe Browsing and ensure that they are not malicious. If you have one time use links included in your messages, make sure that they return early when receiving HEAD requests and only expire on GET requests. That way, our safeguards will not impact any functionality. 👍

Key requirements for email sending approval

To gain approval for sending emails in Intercom, it is important to:

  1. Verify User Consent: Ensure you have an opt-in process for users to subscribe to receive emails. This is essential to maintain compliance with email marketing regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM.

  2. Verify Your Domain: Complete the verification process for your company or app's email domain. This step helps confirm the legitimacy of the sender.

  3. Engage Active Users: Regularly clean your email list by removing inactive or unengaged users. It's recommended to focus on users who have been active within the last 18 days to reduce unsubscribes and spam complaints.

Addressing email sending pauses

Email sending might be paused in your Intercom workspace for reasons such as non-compliance or pending manual review. Here’s how to resolve these issues:

  1. Understand the reason for pauses: Manual evaluations are conducted for all new apps to ensure compliance. Non-compliance with guidelines or incomplete workspace details can result in pauses.

  2. Submit missing information: Provide additional information as outlined in the requirements section to help our Support team complete the approval process.

Tips for maintaining email sending approval

  • Monitor User Engagement: Regularly manage your email list and remove unengaged users to ensure optimal delivery rates.

  • Stay Transparent: Be clear about how you handle user data and email consent to remain compliant with industry regulations.

  • Follow Intercom’s Email Sending Guidelines.

By following these guidelines, you can ensure consistent and compliant email-sending capabilities with Intercom.


💡Tip

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