Configure Inbound and Outbound Email Messages

This article contains the following topics:

As an administrator you must configure the application to enable the automatic ticket creation, updating, and notification from emails. See Understand Email Processing. 

Configure Inbound Email Messages

Mailboxes are required to create tickets from emails that users send. The ticket creation is based on the contents of the subject line of the email. Review the rules for the ticket creation in the article Understand Email Processing. You can create multiple mailboxes and can associate each one with a ticket type.
Considerations

.MSG file attachments are not supported when creating tickets through email.

Follow these steps:

1. Navigate to MANAGE> ADMINISTRATION> Tools> Slice Configuration> Inbound Email.
2. Click + (plus) on the bottom left corner of the window to add a mailbox.
3. Enter a name for the mailbox. This is just a display name to help identify this inbox
4. Enter an inbox name for the email address in the Associated Email Address field. For any mailbox, do not use a domain that is outside of serviceaide.com. The part of your email address after the "@" symbol (the email domain) is always based on your application instance. For example:
   
   • CSM2 - Germany:
     
     • Production: <anything>@mail-prod2.serviceaide.com
     • Staging: <anything>@mail-stag2.serviceaide.com
   • CSM3 - United States:
     • Production: <anything>@mail-prod3.serviceaide.com
     • Staging: <anything>@mail-stag1.serviceaide.com
5. Select an email protocol in the Protocol field.
   Depending upon the email server you are using, you can specify one of these options to configure your inbound email messages:
   1. SMTP: 
   2. IMAP: This protocol is only supported on-premises as we are not allowing external mailboxes in cloud.
   3. IMAPS: This protocol is only supported on-premises as we are not allowing external mailboxes in cloud.
   4. NoReply: This option is used for white labeling and actually useful for outbound email messages. For more information on white labeling, see White Label Outgoing Email in the last section.
      Note: Based on the encryption type you must specify the port in the Configuration Parameter page, for the inbound email configuration.
      
      For example, If the The Parameter Value is set to:
      • None: The default value for the port, 25 is used.
      • SSL: Port 443 can be used.
      • TLS: Port 587 can be used.
6. Values for the Server Name, Username, and Password fields are no longer used and can be left blank. These fields were for on-premise mail servers in previous releases only.
7. Set 'Leave Message' to No if you wish to delete the email from the mailbox after it is read.
8. Associate the mailbox to a ticket type using the Ticket Type field. This information is optional.
   Note: If you do not relate a ticket type to the mailbox, the incoming emails create a ticket of the type Service Request, by default. You can use this feature if you want to create specific types of tickets from mails received in specific mailboxes.

9. Using ' Matching Condition ', you can add a special condition to this rule. In order to create a different type of ticket, add the condition in the Matching condition field. This is a Javascript syntax.
   
   For example: To create an Incident ticket from the inbound emails where the subject or the Message body contains the word "failure", you can use the below matching condition
   if (data.subject.contains("failure") || data.messagebody.contains("failure")){ return "Incident";}
   

   • Condition evaluation should return ticket type only. 
   • The following data variables are available inside the matching condition function. Use the variables to build your own custom condition(s). 
     • data.associated_mail_box contains the receiving mailbox address
     • data.messagebody contains the email content or message body
     • data.subject contains the subject of the email
     • data.from refers to the sender's display name
     • data.senderemail refers to the sender's email address
     • data.to refers to the addressee of the email

   
   

10. Click the Save icon.

    The inbound mail is configured.

The changes to the inbound email configuration are applied in the system within the next 3-5 minutes.

Note: Serviceaide Intelligent Service Management does not support external IMAP connections. Your email domain is always based on your application instance as explained in step 4.

Configure Outbound Email Messages

You can configure Intelligent Service Management to automatically send out notifications as emails. This configuration includes the following two steps:

1. Configure the Notification Delivery job trigger
2. Configure the outbound mailbox

Configure Notification Delivery Job Trigger

Before configuring outbound email, enable and schedule the Notification Delivery job trigger. The notification delivery job trigger sends email notifications to recipients by polling the outbound email queue.

Navigate to MANAGE> ADMINISTRATION> Tools> Slice Configuration> Job Triggers to configure this trigger. The trigger may already exist under a name like Notification Delivery or Deliver Notifications. If it already exists ensure it is enabled. If it doesn't exist, create a trigger with the job type Notification Delivery (ESD). Ensure that you schedule the job trigger in the correct time zone. If the job trigger is not scheduled in the required time zone, no notifications are fired in that time zone.

For more information about job triggers, see Create and Manage Job Triggers.

Note: Configure the outbound email messages after you have configured the Notification Delivery job trigger.

Configure Outbound Mailbox

Set up the outbound mailbox to define how the application sends out email notifications. The administrator can enable encryption for outbound email notifications to protect content, using security protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). 

Note: By default, Serviceaide email server is configured without encryption. This encryption is required, only if custom email server is specified.

Configure email encryption for own mail relay server

To configure outbound email encryption with the SMTP server, you must specify these values:

1. Navigate to Manage> Tools> Configuration Parameter.
2. Specify the parameter name as "EMAIL_SMTP_ENCRYPTION".
3. Choose one of these options from the Parameter Value:
   
    -None: If this option is selected, encryption is not enabled.
   
    -TLS: If this option is selected, your message is encrypted with TLS protocol.
   
    Note: If the encryption type is TLS, you must specify a port number in Parameter Value. For example,  "587" .
   
    -SSL: If this option is selected, your message is encrypted with SSL protocol.
   
    Note: If the encryption type is SSL, you must specify a port number in Parameter Value. For example, "465".
   
   

Configure port number for TLS and SSL

To configure the port numbers for TLS and SSL protocol, specify these details:

1. Navigate to Manage> Tools> Configuration Parameter.
2. Specify the parameter name as "EMAIL_SMTP_PORT".
3. Specify the parameter value as required. You can set the value to 587 or 465 based on the selection of your encryption type.
   
   

Set up the Mailbox

Follow these steps:

1. Navigate to MANAGE> ADMINISTRATION> Tools> Slice Configuration> Outbound Email.
2. Fill in the following details:

For the outbound email configurations to work, you only need to fill in these 3 fields. You can leave the other fields blank.

If you do not configure the outbound email settings, the notifications from Intelligent Service Management are not delivered to any recipients.

After you have configured your mailbox, click Apply Changes to save the settings. The Outbound email is configured.

You can also perform the following tasks on the Outbound Email tab:

Configure Default Recipients

You can configure default recipients for all the outgoing emails.

Specify the default values for the To, CC, and BCC recipients in the following fields:

• Default To Recipient
• Default CC Recipients
• Default BCC Recipient

Use these fields only when you want all your outgoing emails to be addressed to or copied to specific recipients.

Block All Outgoing Emails

If you want to block all outgoing communications from Intelligent Service Management, select Yes in Block Outgoing Emails and specify the email address in the Redirect Email Address.

After you specify the redirect email address, all outgoing emails are sent to the redirect address. They are not sent to the recipients mentioned in the To, CC, and BCC fields. 

Configure HTML Template for Outgoing Emails

You can apply HTML templates on outgoing emails to automatically format them. Click the icon next to the HTML Template field to select a template. You can also directly paste the HTML code in this field.

Note: The HTML template is used to format all outgoing emails.

For example, your template can apply a standard header or footer to all your emails. Use the token {Replace_Message_Body} in your HTML template to replace the actual message body of the communication. 

This configuration does NOT override the communication template. Instead, the HTML code gets applied on the communication template itself. 

For example, the HTML Tag H1 is used for defining Headings. If you specify the {Replace_Message_Body} Tag inside the H1 HTML Tag, the system applies the Heading format to the entire communication template body.

Configure a Specific Reply To Display Name

 The Reply To Display Name can be customized so that any emails received by your users from Intelligent Service Management will display your customized name. You can control the Reply To Display Name from three places in the application:

1. Navigate to MANAGE> ADMINISTRATION> Tools> Configuration Parameters, search for the parameter DEFAULT_REPLYTO_EMAIL_PROFILE_NAME, and modify it as required.
2. From MANAGE> ADMINISTRATION> Tools> Slice Configuration> Outbound Email tab, in the Reply To Display Name field.
3. In a communication template, under the Reply to Display Name field.

If you configure a Reply-To Address using all these methods, the system follows these rules:

• The System first checks the communication template. If Reply To Display Name and Reply-To Address values are set there, they take precedence over other configurations.
• If the value in the communication template is blank, then the system picks the value from the Outbound Email Configurations.
• If both communication template and Mail Configurations are blank, then the system falls back on the default value set in the Slice Configuration Parameter.

White Label Outgoing Email

In Intelligent Service Management you cannot have your own domain name in your email address. The email address domain is dependent upon your application instance.

However, the application allows you to white label your email address to reflect your organizational email domain. The following example explains how to use this feature.

Consider an organization named ACME. This organization ACME can have an Inbound email configured as xxxx@mail-prod1.serviceaide.com.

Now, the ACME administrator wants that the ACME IT Help Desk email address should be support@acme.com. The administrator also wants that when an end user sends an email to support@acme.com it should create a ticket in Intelligent Service Management.

To set up such a system, you need to do the following configurations:

1. Under the Inbound Email tab, configure a mailbox with the following properties:
   • Associated Email Address = support@acme.com
   • Protocol = NoReply
2. Next, under the Outbound Email tab, select the Support@acme.com mailbox as your Reply-To Address.
3. On ACME's own Exchange Mail Server, configure an email redirection so that any email sent to support@acme.com gets redirected to xxxx@mail-prod1.serviceaide.com. Note that:
   
   1. All emails from Intelligent Service Management, received by your end users, will state the Reply To Address as support@acme.com. If a user responds to the email from Intelligent Service Management, the Reply To address is shown as support@acme.com.
   2. If a user sends a new email to support@acme.com, the exchange server at ACME redirects it to xxxx@mail-prod1.serviceaide.com, resulting in a ticket getting created in Intelligent Service Management.

Enhancement to email parsing to handle updates from inbound email

We have a new configuration parameter INBOUND_EMAIL_ONLY_FOR_APPROVAL which can be used only for ticket approvals.  If this is set to Yes, the incoming email will be used only for approvals and if the parameter is set to No, the incoming mails are used for all ticket creation/Updates.