How is Piping *Supposed* to Work?

[somecows]

I am trying to set up my WHMCS and get email piping working for my support departments. However, I can't quite grasp the logic behind what is *supposed* to happen, and thus I can't move forward with seeing if things are working the way they should be. I think I am confused about how email is supposed to be set up, in general.

 

My company is very simple and I just want things to be as easy as possible - I don't need multiple support departments, I'd be happy with just one, I'd be happy with just one email address, really.

 

I was hoping someone could sort of...walk me through how email is supposed to be set up?

 

To start with, when setting up whmcs it asks for "The default sender address used for emails sent by WHMCS". I assume this is supposed to be something very generic? I am using mail@company.com. Does that make sense? If so, is this an address that is supposed to receive mail? That is, should I be checking this account, or should I set it to reject incoming mail? Should it just be used to SEND mail, or should it accept mail too?

 

Thanks so much for any assistance.

[Wiredremix]

For the default address you can use any address for example we use noreply@ for all automaticly created emails.

 

Email piping basicly when a email is recieved at that account it is redirected to whmcs which opens a new ticket for you. There for you can reply to tickets and monitor all emails in/out. IMO a very good system.

 

Unfortunatly i have failed at all attempts at getting the piping to work correctly although correctly setting up everything i belive. Even get the error reported within WHMCS but have had no luck resolving it just yet.

[D9Hosting]

You could just use the 1 email address for the piping. For example, if you use mail@yourdomain.com

 

Create a new support department, and set the email address of that department to mail@yourdomain.com

 

Then, set the default/system address as mail@yourdomain.com, that way if anyone replies it goes to your help desk, and if anyone manually contacts you on mail@yourdomain.com it also goes to your help desk.

 

@Wiredremix - what error message are you receiving?

[vchosting]

Can i also ask what cPanle theme are you using if you are setting up email forwarders. Dependant on the theme depends on how you set up the forwarder to the email account you want forwarding to your ticket system.

 

I had alot of probems initially but managed to sort it so I would be happy to advise what I did if it is the same issue.

[somecows]

hi everyone. i am actually using google aps to host my email, not cpanel. i did set it up the way d9hosting suggested, but it doesnt seem to work. i got an error message that said "blocked potential email loop". i was under the impression you HAD to use more than one email address.

 

but like i said, i still dont get how its supposed to work. say i have mail@company.com as my default address, and then i have a support dept called support with address support@company.com, and then i also have an administrator with the address admin@company.com. and say a client opens a support ticket. who should get notice of that? like, given that scenario, what email account am i supposed to check in order to find the open tickets and the replies that the client makes? i was assuming notification of the open ticket would wind up in the support@company.com email box, but in fact it does not.

 

anyhow im super confused about all of this and how to set it up.

[vchosting]

What address are you sending the test email to the ticket system with. Is it assigned to an administrator account?

 

If so you cannot send the email to test the system with that email account as it is an administrator one. You need to use an accont that is not assigned to an administrator account within WHMCS otherwise you will get the email loop error

[somecows]

thanks a lot for trying to help me - so are you saying i cant use an an administrator account email address AT ALL in the help ticket system - ie not to reply to ticket, and so on. or are you just saying i cant OPEN a ticket by sending an email from an administrator account email account?

[vchosting]

The easiest way is to set it as follows

 

Your administrator account for whmcs = yourname@yourdomain.com

 

Give each support department it's own email account

 

Then to test your piping use a completely seperate email account to test from ie testaccount@yourdomain.com

 

Piping will not work if the ticket to be opened is to be sent from an administrator account as administrators can reply to tickets but not create them.

 

Hope this explains things.

[somecows]

Thank you vchosting, I am about to test this out. First, one question. Can the default email address for whmcs (the default address from which whmcs emails are sent) be the SAME as the support department email address?

 

As I said, I wanted to keep things very simple and not have to check more than one email account, so I set up my whmcs using mail@company.com as the default system address, and then I had wanted to use that also as my email address for my one support department.

 

Is this possible or does it cause problems within the system? Can the support department email address be the same as the default whmcs address, or must they be different.

 

 

Thanks!

[vchosting]

As far as I understand it yes.

 

I have my customer service department and my main email that sends out all the emails as the same just in case someone replies directly to an email generated by the system. It hasn't caused me any problems doing it that way.

 

You will have to let me know if you get it working.

[vchosting]

In summary you could have your main system email as mail@yourdomain.com

 

Your support department at mail@yourdomain.com

 

Your administrator account as something private

 

The email account you use to test the support ticket system as something unrelated.

[somecows]

yes that is all correct.

 

both my default system address and support department address are mail@yourdomain.com.

 

my administrator address is myname@yourdomain.com.

 

i just submitted a ticket using a gmail address and here is what happened:

 

1. the client got a confirmation email at their gmail address.

2. i got a notification at my administrator email address myname@yourdomain.com.

3. a ticket was opened that i can see via the web interface.

 

however, no notification was received at the default/support department email address, mail@yourdomain.com. is that proper? i assumed that the support department email address would receive notification when a ticket had been opened?

 

regardless, i then responded to the ticket via my administration email account, myname@yourdomain.com. this resulted in the following:

 

1. the client received a response at their gmail address.

2. the ticket was updated in the web interface.

3. an email was received at the default/support department email address, mail@yourdomain.com. so i guess this is the part that confuses me. this address was not involved initially in the sense that it did not receive any notification when the ticket was initially opened. but now it gets a copy of the response. that seems confusing?

 

sorry for such a long post, just trying to document everything.

[vchosting]

Yes that is perfectly normal - you get the notification to all administrators set up on your account if they have access to that department.

 

You would not normally get another email when replying to the ticket to mail@yourdomain.com but I can only assume that you are getting this as you are replying to the ticket from your google application and not directly from the administration area of WHMCS - Is that correct?

 

Main thing to note is that things appear to be working and you are receiving notifications and so is the customer.

 

Just check in your WHMCS admin area - "Utilities >> Ticket Mail Import Log" and make sure there are no errors as a result of the process you have done. If not all appears to be ok - glad it is working.

 

I am going off line now but will be back online tomorrow uk time if there are any further things that I can help with.

[Wiredremix]

Well i finally managed to also get this working this evening so im pleased. My problem came down to using X3 skin in cPanel. changed it to X2 and worked first time.

[rdavis]

We are using X3 skin in our cPanel with no ill effects. Our email piping has worked right out the gate using the on-line manual instructions.

 

We use nrsupport@yourdomain.com, nrsales@yourdomain.com, nrbilling@yourdomain.com and our main out going email address of sales@yourdomain.com.

[vchosting]

This is a simple issue and that is that theme x3 automatically inserts the hash bang and the first part of the path for you when setting up email forwarders.

 

For instance;-

 

Instead of inserting a forwarder as | php -q /home/username/public_html/whmcs/pipe/pipe.php

 

You simply insert public_html/whmcs/pipe/pipe.php

 

x3 theme in cPanel will automatically insert the | php -q /home/username/

 

That is where most people have difficulty.

[WHMCS John]

so are you saying i cant use an an administrator account email address AT ALL in the help ticket system - ie not to reply to ticket, and so on. or are you just saying i cant OPEN a ticket by sending an email from an administrator account email account?

You can't open a ticket by sending an email from an administrator email account, but you can reply.

[vchosting]

Just as I thought to prevent the email loop.

[somecows]

i think what i am having a logical problem with is the distinction between the administrator email address and the support department email address. the way it seems to work is that the administrator, but not the support department, receive notification when a ticket is opened. and then both receive notification when a ticket is updated - the administrator because he is subscribed, as it were, to the thread, and the support department because it is literally the account to which correspondence is sent.

 

so in other words, my administrator myname@domain.com receives notification of tickets being opened and responded to because it is subscribed to the support department in question. meanwhile the support department address mail@domain.com receives the actual email responses sent by the client because mail@domain.com is the address to which the client is sending messages.

 

so i guess i find that to be confusing. i guess i figured that the messages would somehow get sucked into the piping system and would not ALSO be available for download via my email software. in other words, if a client updates a ticket by responding to it via email, which essentially just involves emailing the support department address, i figured that message would get sucked into the ticketing system and thus would not be on my server available for download via pop or imap.

 

also, i notice that the support department email address mail@domain.com can not be used to jump into the conversation, as a third party. so in other words, the piping system works fine when the client responds to a ticket or when the administrator address myname@domain.com responds to a ticket, but if i try to respond via the support department email mail@domain.com nothing happens, ie no piping occurs.

 

does that make sense?

 

is that how its supposed to work, because thats definitely how mine is working.

Edited February 4, 2010 by somecows

[WHMCS John]

Yes that is all correct.

[somecows]

Cool well, at least I understand now. So one final question and that's it hopefully. Say you have a LARGE company with, I don't know, dozens of help desk tickets per day. That would be a LOT of correspondence and a lot of emails getting downloaded via the support department address - none of which are really necessary. how do the creators of whmcs imagine people will handle this situation? is the idea to use a support department email address that is just sort of in the background, that you never check? im just wondering what the "best" way to set it up is.

[WHMCS John]

Yes, you never check the support department mailboxes via webmail or Outlook or whatever. WHMCS removes the need to do that entirely.