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An Atako agent isn’t a chat window you open when you need it — it’s a collaborator with its own inbox, its own schedule, and its own way of being paged by other systems. Channels are the different ways work reaches an agent, and the different ways it can act back. Every channel is opt-in. You activate the ones a given agent needs from its panel on the Floor, and each one comes with its own guardrails — quotas, approval gates, verification — so an always-on agent never becomes an open door.

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The five channels

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Where to find each channel

Select an agent on the Floor to open its panel. The Channels section lists Chat, Webhooks, Mailbox (email), and Inter-agents; each opens in its own window, and the address of that window can be shared: Scheduled tasks (cron) aren’t a channel window: they’re listed in the Scheduled tasks section of the same panel.

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Which agents can use which channel

Channels depend on the agent’s engine. A general-purpose (Hermes) agent can use all five. A coding (opencode) agent only has chat and inter-agent — and on inter-agent it can only receive messages and reply, never start an exchange.

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Where work comes from

Whatever the source, an inbound message becomes the same thing on the agent’s side: a work item it can reason about and act on. The agent doesn’t need to know or care whether a request arrived from a person typing in chat, an email from a customer, or an event pushed by a third-party system.

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Principles shared by every channel

  • Nothing is lost. Inbound messages are queued if the agent is momentarily unavailable, and replayed as soon as it reconnects. There is no silent drop.
  • Every channel has a quota. Email sends, webhook events, and inter-agent messages are all capped per day (and often per minute), so a runaway integration or a compromised source can’t burn through your agent’s time unchecked. Exact defaults are documented on each channel’s page.
  • Origin is always visible. Every inbound message — whatever its channel — appears in the agent’s activity timeline tagged with a badge: chat, email, webhook, cron, or inter-agent. You always know where a given action started.
  • Activation is per agent, per channel. Turning on email for one agent doesn’t expose it on another. Each channel is configured independently from that agent’s panel.
Start with chat and add channels as the agent’s role grows — a support agent might only need email, while an operations agent might need webhooks and cron from day one. See Agents for how channels fit into an agent’s overall configuration, and Integrations for connecting external tools beyond these channels.