Connect email mailboxes for support and publishing

Choose the right email authorization mode

EleonEcho distinguishes Microsoft delegated/shared mailboxes, Microsoft application mailboxes, Gmail OAuth and generic IMAP/SMTP mailboxes. Choose the mode your mail administrator can authorize. Delegated access follows an authorized user's mailbox permissions; application access depends on the organization's application configuration and mailbox restrictions. A shared Microsoft mailbox has different synchronization behavior from the delegated owner's mailbox.

Generic IMAP/SMTP uses a password or app password with mandatory STARTTLS or TLS-on-connect. Plaintext transport and generic OAuth SASL are outside this mode's current scope. If SMTP credentials are not overridden, the configuration reuses the IMAP credentials. Supply the actual mail server endpoints and supported ports; endpoint and certificate validation must succeed before activation.

Activate an email Support channel

1. Authorize and validate the mailbox through External Connections.
2. Create a compatible Support channel in the intended workspace.
3. Save the channel's Ticket prefix, numbering padding, acknowledgement choice, locale and message template.
4. Configure the support Department and its default outbound mailbox through Departments and routing.
5. Activate the mailbox with either new messages from activation or an intentional lookback.
6. Verify incoming message capture, ticket creation, attachment safety and an outgoing reply.

The available email lookback is 1–90 days. Backfill is processed through ordinary threading and can create or reopen Tickets, but does not send automatic acknowledgements. Choose it deliberately: connecting an established mailbox can expose substantial historical work to your support team.

Understand how synchronization behaves

Mailbox synchronization leaves upstream read/unread state, folders and labels unchanged. Generic IMAP reads INBOX without marking messages read. Its connection has a polling interval from 1 to 60 minutes, which the channel snapshots on activation or reactivation. A manual sync bypasses the scheduled due-time check, while preserving the normal protection against overlapping synchronization.

Microsoft owner and application mailbox modes can use notifications with delta recovery. Delegated shared mailboxes use scheduled delta polling. Gmail can use push notifications with history recovery or polling, depending on deployment configuration. These mechanisms recover progress after interruptions; they do not make every message appear instantaneously.

If mail is late, inspect connection authorization, channel health and the configured synchronization mode first. Check the activation boundary before treating an old message as missing. Repeatedly reconnecting the same mailbox is not the first recovery step.

Follow the conversation into Tickets

EleonEcho first uses email reply references, then a recognized ticket marker, provider conversation context and finally a constrained subject match to find an existing ticket. Subject matching also requires the same mailbox and a recognized requester or participant, with exactly one candidate. Ambiguous matches create a new ticket rather than guessing which customer thread to change.

The requester is normally resolved from a usable Reply-To address, falling back to From. A valid participant reply can reopen a closed ticket. An unknown sender cannot join an existing ticket merely by quoting its number. See Contacts, Accounts and participants for identity and access behavior.

Check delivery and attachment outcomes

Outbound email can be queued, sending, accepted, retryable or permanently failed, or ambiguous. Provider acceptance is not proof that a recipient received or opened an email. If a send has an unknown outcome, the system reconciles it against provider message evidence before allowing supervised recovery; sending another copy immediately can create duplicates.

Email content is sanitized for display and remote tracking images are blocked by default. Attachments need a Safe verdict before preview or download. A Pending Scan file is still awaiting a safety decision. Use ticket replies and internal notes for the staff workflow.

For broadcasts, create a separate email mailing-list channel. Legacy SMTP/SendGrid publishing is not this synchronized email-to-ticket connector. Availability still depends on deployed provider authorization, synchronization and safety services.