Two separate things, and it is worth knowing which is which because they fail differently.
Sending — your replies leave from support@yourdomain.com instead of a
generic address, and land in inboxes rather than spam folders.
Receiving — someone emails your support address and it appears in your desk as a ticket, with their reply threaded underneath.
Sending
Settings → Email → Sending.
You need an email provider. We use Mailgun, and the setup is: create an account, add your domain, and paste the API key here.
Then the part people skip: your domain needs DNS records so that mail claiming to be from you is trusted. Your provider gives you two or three records (SPF, DKIM, and usually a DMARC one) to add wherever your domain is managed.
Skip the DNS records and your mail still sends — it just quietly goes to spam. That is the worst failure mode there is, because nothing looks broken. We check the records for you and say plainly when they are not right.
Receiving
Settings → Email → Receiving.
Your desk has an address that already works. Point your public support address at it by forwarding, or set the routing rules your provider gives you.
Test it by emailing your support address from a personal account. A ticket should appear within a few seconds.
When mail arrives that we cannot place
Sometimes a message arrives that does not belong to any existing ticket and has no recognisable sender — an automated bounce, a forwarded chain, a reply from a different address than the one that opened the ticket.
Rather than throw it away, we keep it under Settings → Unmatched email for 30 days so you can look at it and decide. Worth glancing at in your first week: it usually reveals a forwarding rule that is not quite right.
If replies are not arriving
In order of likelihood:
- Check the DNS records. Settings → Email says whether they are right.
- Check the mail log (Settings → Email → Log). Every message we send is recorded with what the provider said about it. "It never arrived" is answerable here rather than a matter of opinion.
- Check your provider's own dashboard for bounces or suppressions. A customer whose address bounced once may be suppressed at the provider.