Working with email in the helpdesk ticketing system

Essentially there are two ticket channels in Jitbit Helpdesk – web interface and email (but we also have live-chat widget, API and 3rd party integrations with apps like WhatsApp etc.)

When working with email Jitbit Helpdesk can pull messages from your support mailbox and create tickets out of them.

How to connect a mailbox to your Helpdesk

There are two ways to make helpdesk pull email messages from your support mailbox and create tickets out of them.

1. Forward all email to your built-in mailbox (hosted/saas version only)

Every hosted Helpdesk instance comes with a built-in mailbox that looks like "support@company-name.jitbit.com" (where "company-name" is your account URL). All email messages sent to this address will be instantly converted into tickets.

You can also forward to an address like "support-3221@name.jitbit.com" where "3221" is the ticket-category ID, which will route the incoming ticket to this category automatically. Actually, using "support" is not even necessary, you can use "any-word-you-like-3221". This way you can set up different autoresponders based on different ticket categories etc.

If you have an existing mailbox you want to use, you can just forward all mail to you built-in mailbox.

2. Connect your mailbox(es) to Helpdesk via POP or IMAP

You can connect as many mailboxes as you want to Helpdesk. To do that you need to go to Admin panelEmail settingsAdd\remove incoming email accounts. You need to know POP3 or IMAP server address as well as your login an password. You can even bind a mailbox to a category so that every new ticket created from that mail account will be created in that category.

In this case Helpdesk pulls messages from your mailboxes every 5 minutes.

How it works

Helpdesk takes all messages from your connected mailboxes and either creates new ticket or adds the message content as a reply to an existing ticket. It depends on a message subject line.

If the subject has something like {12345} in it then it means that this is a reply to an existing ticket with number 12345 and Helpdesk will add it to that ticket. If the subject doesn't contain {Ticket} string, Helpdesk will create a new ticket.

All imported email messages are deleted from your mailserver to prevent creation of duplicate tickets.

Troubleshooting 

1. Helpdesk doesn't create tickets from email messages
In Admin panelEmail settings and check, if you have Enable automatic email checker and Accept emails from unregistered users. If they are enabled and you still don't see any tickets, go to Add\remove incoming email accounts and press test button, it may give you some clues.

2. I can't connect mailbox to Helpdesk because of an error
Please make sure that you have entered correct settings for your mail server. Try add it with "use SSL" turned on and make sure you are using the correct port.

3. Some emails are imported, while others are ignored
In Email settings check if you have Accept emails from unregistered users turned on.

4. Messages are added to existing tickets even when there' no {TicketID} number in the subject line
Jitbit Helpdesk ticketing system - setting up email integration and solving common problems