SupportCandy Email Piping 3.3.1

SupportCandy Email Piping adds ability to import emails directly to your ticket system so that client can create ticket just by sending email to your support or reply ticket by replying to email notification without need to login your site. Ex. Your customer created ticket on your website. You replied the ticket and notification will sent to customers email address. Ideally customer should come to your website and then reply to the ticket, but this rarely happen. Instead he reply directly to email notification and you simply can not control your customers. This way, you have to keep checking your inbox and chances to miss the communication are high. Email Piping add-on covers you here, it imports all your inbox emails in desired tickets. If an email is not meant to reply existing ticket, it creates a new ticket. This way you can simply ask your customers to send an email to your specific email address (e.g. support@yourdomain.com) which then will get converted to ticket on your website. There are two Email Piping Methods available:

1. IMAP
2. Gmail

IMAP Method

This is most popular protocol to import emails. Also it is very fast as because emails is being imported from same server most of the time where website is hosted.

Gmail Method

Even though IMAP is most popular way to import emails but there are some technical limitations to use it as given below –

1. Gmail IMAP is not reliable and you need to enable less secure apps access in settings of google account which is threat to google account security. Google have given Rest APIs for their various products to access data securely with user consent. As there are lots of users which uses gmail as their email provider for sending and receiving emails, it was necessary to have this method for them.
2. php-imap module is required to be enabled on php server in order to work IMAP method. Some host providers (very few) do not give this module in their shared hosting plan.

Above limitations needed workaround for IMAP to work exactly the same way, so we have implemented Gmail API to pipe emails. You need free (or your Google for business) gmail account to pipe emails. You can forward all incoming emails from your domain email address (e.g. support@yourdomain.com) to gmail account you are going to pipe (no forwarding needed if you want your customers to send emails to gmail account). Your customers will interact you in your domain email address only and not gmail account. Gmail account only needed to pipe emails which got forwarded to it. See below flowchart to understand workflow of Gmail Method Piping:

Multiple Email Account Piping

You may want to pipe multiple email accounts with SupportCandy to import emails. You simply need to forward all of them to already piped account. Forwarded email will maintain original To email address to distinguish it from others using below feature –

Email Piping Rules

Regardless of any method you use, you may need some automation such as to set ticket fields based on words of the email subject & body OR to which email address it has originally sent (forwarded email address). This rule when matched, add fields to ticket which was set in rule. See below screen-shots to understand it better –