✉️ Your Emails: Sending Service, Branding And Alerts

Settings, Email controls everything the desk emails: confirmations and replies to your customers, and alerts to you. Getting this right is what makes your replies reach the inbox instead of spam.

Where to find it:

Open Settings on the desk's menu bar, then the Email tab.

How your emails are sent:

Choose This site's normal mail, or My own sending service. A sending service of your own is the single biggest thing you can do to stop support email landing in spam.

1. Press My own sending service.
2. Under Who sends your email?, press your service: Gmail or Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365, SMTP2GO, Brevo (Sendinblue), Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES or Postmark. The server details fill themselves in.
3. Type the Username and Password the service gave you.
4. Security: TLS on port 587 in the usual case, SSL on port 465, or None.
5. Press Save Settings, then Send A Test Email.

Replies are sent from the address on Settings, General, and most services only accept mail from an address on a domain you have verified with them. The test uses exactly what a customer would get and tells you plainly what the mail server answered.

Your passwords are stored encrypted:

The sending service password and the mailbox password are sealed with your site's own security keys. A saved password shows as Saved; leave the box empty to keep it, type a new one to replace it, or tick Remove it to clear it.

How your emails look:

• Logo address: choose a logo from your Media Library with Choose. A wide logo on a plain or transparent background works best. Leave it empty and your name is used in words.
• Logo height (pixels).
• Colour: the bar at the top and the buttons.
• Add my own message to the end of every customer email, with Your message: office hours, where the help centre is, whatever you would otherwise type every time. It goes under every reply in small print, never on the alerts that come to you, and any single reply can leave it out with the tick on the reply box.

Everything the desk sends uses this look: confirmations, your replies, sign-in links and your alerts.

What your customers are sent:

Confirm when a customer adds to a ticket from their support page is on by default. They get We got your update with what they wrote and the button to follow the ticket. Reopening a ticket gets the same. Several updates in a few minutes get one confirmation, and a reply sent by email is never answered with another email.

Who gets told, and when:

The mail that comes to you. A line says who would be emailed right now. Each kind has its own switch:

• A new ticket arrives.
• A customer replies to a ticket.
• Somebody asks to speak to a person.
• A ticket comes in angry.
• A ticket passes your response target.

How often, for the two busy ones: Every one, the moment it happens; One summary an hour, when there is something in it; or One summary a day, at the hour you pick under If it is once a day, at what time, in your site's own time. A summary is one email listing what came in, each ticket once, with a link to open it. The other three are always sent as they happen.

Anybody else who should be told: one address a line. They are added to your support address, never replace it, and only get the alerts ticked above.

Step by step, setting up SMTP2GO:

1. In SMTP2GO, verify your sending domain, for example yoursite.com, and add an SMTP user.
2. On Settings, Email, press My own sending service, then SMTP2GO.
3. Type the SMTP2GO username and password.
4. Leave Security on TLS, port 587.
5. Press Save Settings, then Send A Test Email.
6. Check the test in your own inbox, not spam.

Good values:

• Colour: your brand colour; it fills the top bar and the buttons, with white text on them.
• Logo height: 40 pixels suits most wide logos.
• Your message: two short lines at most, such as your support hours and where keys and downloads are.
• How often: Every one while you are small, One summary an hour once the alerts get busy.

What every customer email carries:

Your logo or name, your colour, the message, one clear button such as Follow Your Ticket, your closing message if switched on, and a line saying that replying continues the conversation. The subject starts with the ticket number, which is how replies find their way back.

A real example:

Yoursite Studio sends through SMTP2GO from support@yoursite.com with a blue colour and the closing message "Our support hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm UK time." Sam chose One summary an hour for new tickets and replies, and added jo@yoursite.com so Jo is told too.

Tips:

• Always press Send A Test Email after changing anything here.
• Use a summary if your phone buzzes too often; the inbox itself is always up to date.
• For reading your mailbox, see Connecting Your Support Email With IMAP.