Frequently asked questions

Everything people commonly ask about Pigeon. Still stuck? Check Troubleshooting or open a GitHub issue.

General

Pigeon is a free Craft CMS 5 plugin that adds threaded, two-way messaging to your site — a customer-support inbox for guests and private direct messages between users — with email, control-panel and on-site notifications.
Any Craft site that needs conversations: “ask customer service” support, member-to-member messaging, author/editor back-and-forth, or simple ticketing — without bolting on a separate help-desk tool.
A contact form fires off one email and forgets. Pigeon keeps a saved, two-way thread: the customer can reply, your team replies back from the control panel, everyone is notified, and the whole conversation persists for both sides.

Pricing & licensing

It’s free. There’s no license fee and no subscription — install it from the Plugin Store or with Composer.
Pigeon is distributed free under the standard Craft plugin license. “Free” here means no cost, which is separate from any specific open-source license.

Guests & support inbox

No. Guests start a support thread with just their email and reply through a private, expiring link emailed to them.
Every notification email contains a fresh, signed link scoped to that one thread. If a link expires, the guest can request a new one by email.
Yes, once you set an attachment volume in settings. Uploads are validated against your size and extension limits and stored as native Craft assets.
Guest forms use per-IP rate limiting, an optional honeypot field, and CSRF protection. Tokens are single-thread scoped, so they can’t be used to fish for other conversations.

Direct messages

Direct messages are between Craft user accounts, so they require an edition that allows multiple users (Team or Pro). The guest support inbox works on every edition, including Solo.
Yes. A thread can have multiple participants; each tracks their own read state and unread count.

Notifications

From one place: a queued email to the other party, a control-panel dashboard widget and nav badge for staff, and on-site unread counts for logged-in users via craft.pigeon.
Emails go through Craft’s queue and mailer. Make sure your email settings work and the queue runs (php craft queue/run in production). See Troubleshooting.
Yes — each participant has a notify flag that acts as a per-thread unsubscribe.

Data, privacy & security

No. Internal notes are staff-only — they’re excluded from every guest and user view and from their notifications.
In your own Craft database and asset volumes. Nothing is sent to a third-party service. Attachments are native Craft assets, so access is gated to thread participants.
Pigeon stores only a hash of each token; the raw token is only ever emailed. Tokens are scoped to a single thread and expire on a sliding schedule.

Requirements & support

Craft CMS 5.4 or later and PHP 8.2 or later. Works with MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Yes. Threads are standard Craft elements and respect your site setup; guest links are built from the relevant site URL.
Open an issue on the GitHub repository — the link is in the navigation and footer.