Configuring Email Support

The following details will assist you in getting up and running with the Email Support extension.

For a detailed overview of the functionality available within this extension, view the Email Support product page.

Installation

For assistance on installing a premium plugin for KB Support, please view this article.

Settings

Before you begin creating the connections to your mailbox(es), you should review the setting options for Email Support and ensure that the plugin is configured to work correctly for your business.

Click on the Settings option within the Tickets menu and select the new Email Piping tab. This page is where you will manage all options for the Email Support extension. There are 3 sections;

General Settings

This is where you’ll configure the main settings for how the plugin should work. The following settings are available:

Open New Tickets
If you enable this option, emails received where no existing ticket can be identified will result in a new ticket being created.

Must be Registered
This setting works in conjunction with the Open New Tickets setting. If Open New Tickets is enabled, enabling this option will ensure that only customers who are already registered as a support customer can open new tickets.
If left disabled whilst Open New Tickets is enabled, a new customer will be created if the sender email address cannot be identified as an existing customer.

Anonymous Replies
Enabling this option will allow any user to add a reply to the ticket via email regardless of whether they are the ticket owner, or an existing ticket participant. The user will also be added as a ticket participant to ensure they receive notifications when the ticket is updated in the future.
The Ticket Participants feature must also be enabled for Anonymous Replies to work.

Ticket ID Wrap
KB Support will identify tickets by the ticket ID being included within the subject line of an email. The characters you enter here will determine how the Email Support extension identifies a ticket number.
If you leave this option as the default ## we’ll search the email subject for a string wrapped between ##. i.e. ##100##.
If you have ticket prefixes and/or suffixes enabled, these will be included within the search.
You should ensure that your KBS email notifications to agents and customers include the ticket ID (wrapped within the given characters) in their subject.

Poll Mailboxes Every
This setting determines how frequently the Email Support extension connects to the configured mailboxes to search for new emails.
Generally, every 15 minutes is a good interval however, you can adjust it here should you need to.
Remember, we use the built-in WordPress cron feature to execute the polling tasks and these require activity on your website to run. Therefore, if you have this set to 15 minutes but there are no visitors to your website for 30 minutes, no poll will take place for 30 minutes.

When Processed
This setting allows you to determine what happens to an email once is has been processed by the Email Support extension.
Choose to either delete the message from the mailbox, or simply mark it as read and leave it within the mailbox. Read messages will not be processed again.

Server Connections

The server connections screen displays a list of configured server connections, together with some stats relating to the connection – for example, the last time it was polled, the number of messages processed during the last poll, and the total number of messages processed for the mailbox.

You can also edit or delete existing connections as well as initiate a test connection. During a test, we’ll verify we can access and login to the mailbox successfully and report the result back to the screen.

To add a new connection, click the Add Server Connection button and enter the relevant information for the mailbox you wish to connect to.

We can process both HTML text as well as Plain Text from emails received. Select your preferred option before clicking Save Server Connection.

Note that we only process a few HTML tags in HTML emails. The rest are stripped. A list of the default tags we will process can be found here.

Notifications

This is where you can choose whether or not to send email responses to emails received that cannot be processed.

Enter the subject and content that you want to include within the email. You can include the {unassigned_reason} email tag if you want to include the reason as to why the email could not be processed.