Setting up your first inbox and email intake

Every ticket in Helmdesk can start from three places: your client portal, live chat, or an email sent straight to your support address. This guide covers the third one — turning a real inbox into a working ticket queue.

How email intake actually works

Helmdesk doesn't poll a mailbox. Instead, an inbound email provider (we use Postmark) receives mail sent to your support address and forwards it to Helmdesk as a webhook the moment it arrives. That webhook:

1. Looks up which tenant the message belongs to, using the address it was sent to.
2. Checks whether the message is a reply to an existing ticket or the start of a new one.
3. Creates a new ticket (or appends a reply to the existing one) with the sender's email set as the requester.

There's no delay waiting for a scheduled check — a new email becomes a ticket within seconds of arriving.

New ticket vs. a reply to an existing one

Every outbound reply Helmdesk sends uses a Reply-To address that encodes which ticket it belongs to. When your client hits "Reply" in their own email client, that reply threads back onto the correct ticket automatically — you never have to match it up by subject line or by hand.

If a customer emails your support address cold (not as a reply to anything), it always becomes a new ticket.

Setting your inbound address

Your inbound address takes the shape {your-tenant-slug}@inbound.{your-domain} — for example, if your tenant slug is acme, mail sent to acme@inbound.helmdesk.ca lands as a new ticket in your queue. Ask your Helmdesk contact for your exact address if you're not sure of your tenant slug.

If you want your clients to keep emailing your existing support address (like support@youritcompany.com) rather than a @inbound.helmdesk.ca address directly, set up a mail forwarding rule at your existing provider that forwards to your Helmdesk inbound address. Your clients never need to know the underlying address changed.

What happens next

Once a ticket exists, it behaves exactly like one created any other way:

• It's picked up by automatic routing if you've turned that on, or sits unassigned for an agent to claim.
• SLA timers start counting from the moment it's created — see Configuring SLA policies.
• A reply from an agent goes back out over email automatically, threaded correctly.

Troubleshooting

A client says they emailed support and nothing happened. Check that they emailed the correct inbound address — a message sent to the wrong address (or a personal inbox instead of the shared one) never reaches Helmdesk at all, since there's no polling fallback to catch it later.

Replies aren't threading onto the right ticket. This almost always means the client's email client stripped the original Reply-To address, most commonly by replying to a forwarded copy of the notification rather than the original. Ask them to reply directly to the notification email itself.