Configuring Mail accounts

Quick navigation

• Introduction
• Connecting your own mail account with LiveAgent
  • Built-in connectors
    • Gmail connector (has it's own article)
  • Forwarding (has it's own article)
  • Email Piping (has it's own article)
  • Custom IMAP/POP3 connection
• Advantages of Forwarding/Piping over IMAP/POP3
• Periodicity of email fetching for IMAP/POP3 connections
• How is SPAM recognized? (has it's own article)
• How to connect Office 365 shared email account? (has it's own article)

Introduction

LiveAgent helpdesk software allows you to connect your own email accounts and therefore have all your business emails stored in LiveAgent as tickets. Once you connect your mailbox with LiveAgent, your agents can respond to these emails directly from their LiveAgent panel without any need to use other 3rd party mailing system like outlook, for example. You can connect as many mail accounts as you need, there are no limitations. Also if you wish to allow access to specific mail accounts only for specific agents in your LiveAgent software, you can use our departments feature to achieve that. This is most commonly used if you are providing support for multiple brands or businesses with a single LiveAgent account, or to differentiate between your own company departments like Sales, Technical, etc... 

Connecting your own mail account with LiveAgent

In order to connect a new mail account, navigate to Configuration > Email > Mail accounts. Here you will find a list of already connected mail accounts and you can also connect new mail accounts by clicking Add mail account button.

After pressing the Add mail account button a new screen appears, here you can choose from a few predefined email connectors for various mail providers like our Gmail account connector, for example.
If you are using some other mail account provider or you want to connect your own mail server, you will need to select the Other method.

Options available under the Other method are different for hosted LiveAgent accounts and standalone LiveAgent installations installed on your own servers.

• Hosted LiveAgent account offers you to set up a faster, direct connection via email forwarding and it also allows you to connect custom mail account via IMAP/POP3 and SMTP.
  
• Standalone LiveAgent installation offers custom IMAP/POP3 and SMTP connection as well and the Forwarding option is replaced by email Piping.
  

Should I choose email Forwarding/Piping or IMAP/POP3

With the Forwarding option, the emails are fetched into the application faster, however it uses our own servers to send out your replies. The major downside to this is that our servers are used to send out a great amount of emails and therefore are prone to being blacklisted by various services without us even noticing. This makes the use of Forwarding risky for any business use where you really need to have all your emails delivered.

Despite Forwarding being the faster option we recommend the use of IMAP and SMTP protocols for receiving and sending emails. POP3 should be used only as the last resort, since IMAP protocol is far more superior.