Converting emails into tickets (email piping, email to ticket)

Hesk supports converting customer emails into support tickets. Your customers may also reply to emails and have their replies applied to the appropriate ticket.

Note that for security reasons, staff members cannot reply to tickets via email. They must log in to the Hesk web interface to reply.

There are three ways you can get your emails into Hesk:

1. Email Piping,
2. IMAP Fetching,
3. POP3 Fetching.

Each of these requires some server-side setup, but the result is the same - your customer emails will be turned into tickets.

Let's have a look at the pros and cons of the three options:

1. Email Piping

In email piping, your server's mail transfer agent delivers emails to a PHP script instead of to a mailbox.

Pros:

• this is usually the fastest way of converting emails to tickets (email are processed immediately as they arrive).

Cons:

• you can only set up email piping if your mail server is located on the same server as your help desk,
• some web hosting control panels, such as Cpanel, make it easy to set up email piping, while it may be difficult or impossible on other servers,
• because emails are sent directly to Hesk, you will not have access to copies of original emails.

Set up guide: Setting up email piping

2. IMAP Fetching

IMAP fetching requires an email account to be set up (with an Inbox). Hesk will connect to the email account, download unread emails, and process them.

Pros:

• you can connect any email account, for example, email hosted on another server or one provided by a cloud provider (Gmail, Microsoft 365, ...),
• in IMAP fetching, Hesk will only download unread emails from your server,
• any processed email can be marked as read and remain in your mailbox for backup and reference.

Cons:

• a cron (scheduled) job needs to be set up on the help desk server that will run the IMAP fetching script, for example, every 5 minutes,
• there is a slight delay, usually up to 5 minutes, before an email arrives and is processed by Hesk,
• PHP on your server must support IMAP; some hosting companies have IMAP support disabled.

Set up guide: Setting up IMAP Fetching

3. POP3 Fetching

POP3 fetching is similar to IMAP fetching; it requires an email account to be set up (with an Inbox). Hesk will connect to the email account, download emails, and process them.

The main difference is that POP3 is an older protocol than IMAP and usually does not support downloading unread emails only; your mail server will send ALL emails that are in the mailbox to Hesk.

Pros:

• you can connect any email account, for example, email hosted on another server or one provided by a cloud provider (Gmail, Microsoft 365, ...),
• works with default PHP installation and doesn't require any extra libraries.

Cons:

• does not support fetching unread emails only; all the emails your mail server sends to Hesk will be processed,
• your mail server may send the same emails over and over again if you decide to keep a copy of your emails on the server,
• a cron (scheduled) job needs to be set up on the help desk server that will run the POP3 fetching script, for example, every 5 minutes,
• there is a slight delay, usually up to 5 minutes, before an email arrives and is processed by Hesk.

Set up guide: Setting up POP3 Fetching

So, which one is for you? That's for you to decide based on your specific requirements. In Hesk Cloud, we usually recommend using IMAP Fetching.