Settings, Email controls everything the desk emails, both to your customers and to you.
How your emails are sent:
Choose This site's normal mail, or My own sending service. A sending service of your own is the single biggest thing you can do to stop support email landing in spam. Click your service and the details fill themselves in: Gmail or Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365, SMTP2GO, Brevo, Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES or Postmark. Then add the username and password that service gave you. Security is TLS on port 587 in the usual case, SSL on port 465, or None.
Your passwords are stored encrypted:
The sending service password, and the mailbox password under Turn emails into tickets, are sealed with your site's own security keys. The box never shows a saved password: it says Saved. Type a new one to replace it, with Saved and stored encrypted underneath. Leave the box empty to keep the saved password, type a new one to replace it, or tick Remove it to clear it. If your site's security keys are ever changed, the screen asks you to type the password again. Passwords saved before this protection arrived are sealed by themselves the next time you open the admin.
Replies are sent from the address on the General tab, and most services refuse mail unless that address belongs to a domain you have verified with them. Press Send A Test Email after saving. The test uses exactly what a customer would get, and tells you plainly what the mail server answered.
How your emails look:
Choose a logo from your Media Library, set its height in pixels and pick a colour for the bar at the top and the buttons. A wide logo on a plain or transparent background works best. Leave the logo empty and your name is used in words. Everything the desk sends uses this: confirmations, your replies, sign-in links and the alerts that come to you. Every email comes from your support address and your name.
You can also add your own message to the end of every customer email: office hours, where the members area is, how renewals work. It goes under every reply in small print. It is never added to the alerts that come to you, and any single reply can leave it out with the tick on the reply box.
What your customers are sent:
Confirm when a customer adds to a ticket from their support page is on by default. They get We got your update with what they wrote and the button to follow the ticket. Reopening a ticket gets the same. Several updates in a few minutes get one confirmation.
Who gets told, and when:
The mail that comes to you has a switch for each kind:
- A new ticket arrives
- A customer replies to a ticket
- Somebody asks to speak to a person
- A ticket comes in angry
- A ticket passes your response target
The screen says who would be emailed right now. For the first two, the busy ones, choose Every one, the moment it happens, One summary an hour, when there is something in it, or One summary a day at an hour you pick, in your site's own time. A summary is one email listing what came in, each ticket once, with a link to open it. The other three are always sent as they happen, because waiting an hour would defeat the point.
Anybody else who should be told: add as many addresses as you like, one a line. They are added to your support address rather than replacing it, and they only ever get the alerts you ticked. Nothing a customer sees changes.