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Inbound Mailboxes Example Build

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It is possible to configure an inbound email account that will allow you to receive incoming email into Sonar. Once your inbound email account is configured, it will convert the incoming email automatically to create a new public ticket within the Sonar ticketing interface whenever email is sent to that specific inbox. This will also allow you to have any replies posted on public tickets be emailed to the email address associated with the ticket, using the 'from address' that is configured on the inbound email account.

Replies vs. Comments: All replies posted on a public ticket will be emailed to the email address, using the from address configured on the inbound email account. All comments posted on a public ticket are kept internal and will not be emailed to the associated email address.

How To Create An Inbound Mailbox

Before you can create an inbound email account, you must first have a valid outbound domain configured under Settings > Communications > Email Domains. You can only send replies to tickets received via inbound email from an email address at a valid outbound domain.

How It Works

Sonar inbound email works by creating a random inbound mailbox at the sonarticketing.rocks domain. You then forward all the email you wish to be received by Sonar to this random mailbox. For example, if you wanted support@myisp.com to be received into Sonar, you would create a new inbound email account, set the From name to support and the Email Domain to myisp.com, and then forward all email received by support@myisp.com to the random mailbox created by Sonar.

Inbound Mailbox Settings Overview

When creating an inbound mailbox you will be presented with a Create Inbound Mailbox screen that contains several fields that are required to be filled out before you can successfully create it. An overview of these fields and what they mean are below.

  • Enabled: This checkbox determines if the inbound mailbox is enabled and actively receiving emails
  • Name: This is used as a descriptive name for the inbound mailbox itself
  • From name: The text entered here will be displayed as the name of the sender, when sending replies
  • From mailbox: This is used as the username portion of the email address for the email address that is used for outbound email replies
  • Email Domain: This is the domain part of the email address for the email address that is used for outbound email replies - this must be a valid outbound domain that you have already configured within Sonar
  • Priority: This determines the priority of the ticket created when email is received into this particular mailbox - this dropdown contains values of Critical, High, Medium, and Low.
  • Ticket Group: This field determines which ticket group should be assigned to tickets that are created when email is received into this inbound mailbox
  • Send auto reply: If this is enabled, an additional text box will appear where you can define an automatic reply that will be sent to the original sender when email is received into this mailbox
  • Append signature: If this checkbox is enabled, an additional text box will appear where you can set up a signature that will be appended to any responses to tickets that are sent out from this inbound mailbox.
    You can use the variable [PUBLIC_NAME] in the signature to include the replying user's public name.
  • Enable Slack integration: If your company uses Slack (the instant messaging platform), you can create a webhook to have the creation of tickets or ticket replies trigger the posting of a message to a specific Slack channel. This is done by creating a webhook through Slack and entering that into the Slack webhook URL field that appears once you enable the slack integration checkbox. There will also be another checkbox that appears which, if enabled, will allow for the email body to be posted to the Slack channel as well. For more information on this, please refer to the Slack webhook documentation.

Inbound Mailbox Example Build

We are going to create an inbound mailbox for our incoming support tickets. First, we need to navigate to the Inbound Mailboxes page. This can be done by clicking "Settings" from the lower left side menu, then under the "Ticketing" header, selecting "Inbound Mailboxes", as seen below. From this screen, click "Create Inbound Mailbox" to begin the process.

The Create Inbound Mailbox window will appear once you click "Create" and is where we will fill out all of the necessary details for this mailbox.

As can be seen from the above image, we have filled out all necessary fields for our new inbound mailbox. It is set up to be currently enabled and has been given the Name Inbound Support Tickets so that internally all of our employees know what it is used for with just a glance.

We have set the From name to Sonar and set our inbound email account to be support@isp-portal.net since we have already configured the valid outbound domain isp-portal.net.

We have decided to set the Priority as Low for all initially created tickets and will allow our support agents to change the priority if needed. We have assigned these to the Support Ticket Group because our support team will be the ones who handle the incoming tickets.

Since our team is very diligent with monitoring incoming tickets, we do not have the Slack integration currently enabled, but is always an option we might consider in the future.

Lastly, we have also set up an auto reply and signature. The auto reply is simply to make our customers aware that we have received their email and also provides them with a timeline of when they can expect to hear back from us, as well as an alternative method to contact our team if more urgent assistance is needed. Our signature utilizes the [PUBLIC_NAME] field so that the public name of the employee who responds will be displayed, in addition to our team name Sonar Support along with the phone number that we can be reached at.

Now that we are done with filling out the necessary fields for our inbound mailbox, we click "Create". Our new inbound mailbox is now ready to start receiving incoming mail and can also now be seen listed on the Inbound Mailboxes screen.

Make sure you add the generated "sonarticketing.rocks" email address listed under the "inbound mailbox" column as a forward address in your domain settings in order to correctly receive emails to your Sonar instance.

Once your inbound email account has been created, you can now view, edit, and delete it from this screen, using the "Edit" menu next to it.

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