What are Email Channels?
- Email Channels are one of the communication methods through which end-users can raise incidents.
- They are configured such that whenever a mail is sent by a end-user to the email channel, an incident will be created automatically in service desk.
- It is also the email address that is configured to send out emails or notifications (outgoing) to end-users from help desk and also to receive emails or replies back (incoming) from users back into Service Desk.
How to setup an email channel in Service Desk?
Setting up an email channel has 3 key steps.
- Add an email address
- Setup Incoming Email Setup - to create incidents in service desk.
- Category association
- Email Forwarding Setup and Testing
- Setup Outgoing Email Setup - to send email notifications to the recipients from service desk.
- SPF, DKIM setup and verification or,
- SMTP setup
- The above is required for custom email addresses.
Adding and email address
Follow the steps explained below,
- Navigate to Main Menu > Manage > General Settings > Email Channels
- Click on the + icon under the Email tab to open the Add Email Address form.
- Provide the following details,
- Email address: Enter the email address from which the emails will be routed to HappyFox Service desk
- Choose your mail provider(eg., Google, Yahoo, etc): Choosing the mail provider will help us suggest you the specific help article to follow once you save the channel.
- Choose which Team should use this email address for sending and receiving emails: The team chosen will receive incidents from the email address entered above, and use the same email address to send back responses (If SMTP configured).
- If you do not wish to route these emails to an existing team, you can choose to create a new team to which these incidents should be routed.
- Save the form to add this email channel to your service desk account.
Incoming Email Setup: Email forwarding setup and testing
- Once you have successfully hit Save, you'll have to set up forwarding in your mailbox. Note: Please copy the email to forward emails to. You would need it during forwarding configuration.
- Here are reference links to configure email forwarding in other popular mailboxes:
- If you're using any other mailbox provider, select "Other" and please contact your email administrator and share with him/her the email address to forward to.
- Once you've completed the forwarding configuration in the mailbox settings, come back to the email channel edit page and click on Test Forwarding to test the forwarding setup.
- Once you hit test forwarding, a sample email will be sent from HappyFox servers to your forwarding email address. This should get created as a incident in HappyFox if the auto-forwarding is setup correctly.
- Within a few minutes, you should be seeing a success message.
- This means you would have successfully configured your email channel with auto-forwarding set in your mailbox.
- If the forwarding test failed, please re-check the forwarding setup in your mailbox settings and test again.
Note:
- You can also hover over the status icon on the corresponding row to know the current status of email forwarding setup.
- You'll have to re-test the forwarding to ensure it is marked as a success. If you're still not able to get success after repeated entries, your forwarding configuration is done incorrectly. Please reach out to your mail server admin or contact [email protected] for assistance.
Outgoing Email Setup: SPF, DKIM setup and verification
1. If you have your own domain and if you want to make use of the custom email address associated to your domain as a email channel, and send notifications from Happyfox mail servers automatically, then SPF and DKIM setup and verification needs to be done to make sure the recipients receive the email notifications without any delivery failures.
2. If you are using any email clients like gmail, microsoft, zoho mail etc and want to use those email addresses as email channel and send notifications, then you can setup SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer Protocol] configuration for your respective mailboxes. This will make sure the email notifications are sent to your recipients from your email client server and not Happyfox mail server.
How to setup and verify SPF for email channels?
How to setup and verify DKIM for email channels?