Setting up email addressesWebAsyst Help Desk allows you to create an unlimited number of email addresses for customer requests. To add a new address open section "Settings -> Email boxes" and click the appropriate link on the right. You can use two types of email addresses with WebAsyst Help Desk: Type 1: internal email address based on a domain name of @youraccount.webasyst.net, e.g., support@youraccount.webasyst.net or help@youraccount.webasyst.net. Such an internal email address can be created only by users of the WebAsyst Help Desk online services. Type 2: external email address located on any other mail server; e.g., @yahoo.com or @gmail.com. IMPORTANT NOTE: Be sure to use only one Help Desk application or one email client (Thunderbird, Outlook, WebAsyst Mail) per mail box! Before setting up a mail box in WebAsyst Help Desk, ensure that no other mailing software is connected to it. Failure to follow this advice may result in the inability of WebAsyst Help Desk as well as other email clients to correctly fetch new mail.
Complete the following fields on the email address settings page. "Name & Email" tab Name will be used as the sender's name in your replies to customers' requests. Email: the email address you are setting up. Language: this language will be assigned as the default language to all new customers who send their first request to this email address. If you provide support to a multi-lingual audience, this setting will allow you to attach different email addresses to different languages; e.g., support@yourcompany.com can be attached to the English language and support@yourcompany.de — to German. The former of these addresses can be published on the English version of your company's website and the latter one on the German version. Customers who send requests to support@yourcompany.com would be considered English speakers and their "Language" setting would be automatically assigned the "English" value. This will make their personal online accounts appear in the same language. Incoming mail server. This settings group is available only for external email addresses (see type 2 above). Here you must specify the following connection parameters of the mail server. My mail server: POP3 or IMAP (the IMAP option is temporarily disabled in the current version). Server and Port: These values are usually provided by the administrator of the mail server where your email address is hosted. The port number is most often 110 for regular connections and 143 for secure SSL connections. Username: is almost always the same as the email address; the password is that which you use to connect to the mail box. "Signature" tab The signature is added at the end of each message which you send in response to customer requests from this address. As a rule, it contains the name and postal address of your organization, the telephone number of the support service, etc. You may also add special template variables to the signature which will be automatically replaced with their actual values; e.g., the MY_NAME variable will be replaced with the name of the WebAsyst Help Desk user (support operator) who is sending a reply to the customer and the REQUEST_LIST_URL will become a link to the customer's personal online account. Tip: Add links to your knowledge base and help section to the signature section so that customers can find useful information and answers to some questions. This will allow you to significantly reduce the number of queries sent to you by your customers.
"Receipt" tab The receipt is an auto-response which is sent to the customer after he/she has sent a new request to this email address. After a new request is received, it is immediately assigned a unique number, and a notification is sent back to the customer. Such a notification (receipt) is not a required option, but it is advisable to utilize this option if your response time ranges from several hours to several days. Otherwise a customer may think that his/her request has been lost and will probably re-send it. You may specify the estimated time of response and add useful links to the text of the receipt. It is also recommended to specify a separate email address in the "From" field (e.g., noreply@your_company.com which you do not use for incoming mail) so that a reply of the customer to the receipt does not generate new requests in the queue. Note: Please keep in mind that the address which you decide to specify in the "From" field must exist on your mail server. If it does not, automatic receipts will be rejected as SPAM and will not be delivered to customers.
"Anti-spam" tab To protect yourself from SPAM, enable option "Send automatic confirmation request on messages received from unknown addresses". Any message from an unknown address will be treated as suspicious and an automatic confirmation request will be sent back to the sender. Such a request may contain a special link which must be clicked to confirm the sending of the request. To add such a link, ensure that the confirmation request contains the REQUEST_CONFIRM_URL variable. Add instructions for your customers, if necessary. Enabling the anti-SPAM protection is not necessary if you employ other efficient means of protection or if you have published your email address on a website with limited access which is only visited by registered users. Similar to receipts, it is advisable to send confirmation requests from a special email address like noreply@your_company.com.
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