# Email intake

> Give a project a forwarding address, choose who may forward to it, and see how forwarded emails and their replies land on the board.

This page helps you turn client email into tickets without copying it by hand. By the end your project will have a
forwarding address, you'll know who may send to it, and you'll know how an email and its later replies show up on the
board.

Clients often report a problem by email and then reply several times in the same thread. With email intake, a team
member forwards the client's email to the project's address and By Dawn opens a ticket holding it. When the client replies
and someone forwards that reply too, it lands on the same ticket as a comment instead of opening a new one. The section
says it in one line: **Forwarded emails become tickets. Replies in the thread become comments.**

The address is the project's, so each project that takes email has its own. Email is one way requests reach a
project. A bound Slack, Discord or Teams channel is the other (see [Bind a channel](https://docs.bydawn.com/chat-channels/)).

## Who can do what

The section is in **Settings › This project › Email intake**.

- **Everyone on the project** can see the forwarding address and copy it, because they're the people forwarding to it.
- **Project admins and org admins** turn intake on and off, choose who may forward, replace the address and read the
  **Recent email** list. Everyone else sees **Only project admins and org admins can change these.**

If the section says **Email intake isn’t set up on this deployment yet.**, there's no address to hand out yet. Ask
whoever runs your By Dawn deployment.

## Turn it on

1. Open **Settings › This project › Email intake**.

2. Turn on **Accept forwarded email**. The first time you do, By Dawn creates the project's address, and it appears under
   **Forwarding address**.

3. Under **Who may forward**, list the people allowed to send to the address, one per line, then choose **Save**. See
   [Choose who may forward](#choose-who-may-forward).

4. Choose **Copy** beside the address and share it with the people who receive client email.

Until someone is listed under **Who may forward**, the section warns **No one is allowed yet, so every email to this
address is refused.** Intake starts closed on purpose, so a leaked address can't fill your board.

Turning **Accept forwarded email** off bounces mail but keeps the address. Turn it back on later and the same address
works again, so anyone who saved it doesn't need a new one.

## Choose who may forward

**Who may forward** takes addresses (`ops@example.com`) or whole domains (`@example.com`), one per line. Commas work
too, which helps when you paste a list from an email client.

The person who has to be allowed is **whoever sends the email to the address**. For a forward, that's the team member
who forwards it, not the client who wrote it. So listing your own company's domain is usually all you need: anyone with
an address there can forward. A client can only write to the address directly if you list them.

## Replace the address

If the address has spread further than you meant, choose **New address**, then **Retire the old address** to confirm.
By Dawn creates a new address, and the old one stops working at once: mail to it bounces. Share the new address with your
team.

Mail that arrived at the old address stays in **Recent email**, marked **old address**, so you can still tell where it
came from.

## What an email becomes

A forwarded email that isn't a reply to an earlier one opens a **new ticket** on the project's board (see
[Board and columns](https://docs.bydawn.com/board-and-columns/)):

- **Title:** the email's subject, without prefixes like `FW:`.
- **Description:** who wrote the email and when, who forwarded it, the forwarder's own note if they added one, and the
  client's message, as plain text.
- **Files:** the email's attachments, and the original email as a `.eml` file.
- **Creator:** the client who wrote it, shown with a mail mark as their name and address, then **via email**. No
  member is the ticket's author, because a client isn't a By Dawn member.

The ticket's timeline shows a mail row each time an email reaches it. Everything else about the ticket is ordinary:
assign it, move it and start work on it like any other (see [Tickets and sub-tickets](https://docs.bydawn.com/tickets/)).

By Dawn never shows an email's formatting. An email that only has formatted (HTML) content is turned into plain text, and
the `.eml` keeps the original.

### Customers

When your organization uses [Customers](https://docs.bydawn.com/customers/), By Dawn checks the client's email domain against your customers'
domains as it opens the ticket. The client is the person who wrote the email, never the teammate who forwarded it. On
a match, the ticket gets a request from that customer, with the client's message as its quote and the client as who
asked. A reply in the same thread adds nothing, because the ticket already has that customer.

Email never creates a customer. When the domain isn't a customer yet, the ticket's **Customers** section offers to
create one (see [See who asked on a ticket](https://docs.bydawn.com/customers/#see-who-asked-on-a-ticket)). Personal mail domains, your own
domains and the ones your admins excluded never match.

### Auto-triage

Some emails list several unrelated problems. **Auto-triage emails that list several issues** handles that: when it's
on, each new email ticket also gets a planning run, which proposes one child ticket per issue for your approval.
Nothing is created until you approve. A reply that lands on an existing ticket never starts one. It's off until you
turn it on.

The planning run needs missions to be on for your organization. If it can't start, the ticket is still created, and
its timeline says **Email auto-triage did not start** with the reason.

## Replies and threads

When a client replies and someone forwards the reply, By Dawn looks for the ticket the thread already has. It checks in
this order, and the first match wins:

| Rule | What it looks for |
|---|---|
| **by ticket number** | The project's own ticket number, such as `SAW-123`, in the subject or on the first line of the body. |
| **by email thread** | Reply headers that point to an email the project already received, including one forwarded as an attachment. |
| **by Outlook conversation** | The same Outlook conversation, which Outlook keeps across replies and forwards. |
| **by subject** | The same subject, ignoring `RE:` and `FW:`, from the same client, within the last 30 days. |

If none matches, the email opens a new ticket. An archived ticket never takes a reply.

A matched reply becomes a **comment** on the ticket. It holds only the new text of the reply, without the quoted
history, and it's shown as the client with a mail mark and **via email**.

Typing the ticket number is the sure way to aim a forward at a ticket, because a person typed it on purpose, so it
beats every other rule. Forwarding mail clients often drop the headers that link a reply to its thread, which is why
the other rules exist.

By Dawn doesn't email the client back. Answer them from your own mail client.

## Recent email

Admins see **Recent email** under the settings: the project's latest deliveries, newest first. Each row has the
subject, the ticket it opened or joined (choose the number to open it), what happened, who sent it, and when. A
forwarded email reads as the client's address **via** the forwarder's.

| Outcome | What it means |
|---|---|
| **Opened a ticket** | The email started a new ticket. |
| **Added to a ticket** | The email was a reply and became a comment. The row says which rule matched it, such as **by subject**. |
| **Refused** | Nothing was written to the board. The row says why (see below). |
| **Arriving…** | By Dawn is still placing the email. |

When a reply lands on the wrong ticket, the matching rule in this list tells you why.

### Why an email is refused

A refused email writes nothing to the board and the sender gets a bounce. The reasons:

| Reason | What happened, and what to do |
|---|---|
| **intake was off** | **Accept forwarded email** was off when it arrived. Turn it on and send it again. |
| **failed DMARC** | The sender's domain says this email wasn't really sent by it, so it may be forged. Check with the sender's mail admin if the email was genuine. |
| **sender not allowed** | The address that sent it to By Dawn isn't listed under **Who may forward**. Add the forwarder or their domain, then forward it again. A refused email can be sent again once they're allowed. |
| **delivery interrupted** | By Dawn started placing the email but didn't finish. Delivering it again places it. |
| **processing failed — the relay retries** | By Dawn hit an error placing it. The mail relay tries again on its own, so it usually arrives shortly. |

## Do and don't

- **Do** list your own company's domain under **Who may forward**, rather than each client, so the people who receive
  client mail can forward it.
- **Do** put the ticket number in the subject when you forward a follow-up you know belongs to a ticket.
- **Don't** give the address to clients unless you list them under **Who may forward**. Their mail is refused
  otherwise.
- **Don't** turn intake off to stop one sender. Remove them from **Who may forward** instead, because off bounces
  everyone.

## FAQ

**Can a client email the address directly?**

Only if you list their address or domain under **Who may forward**. Intake is built around a team member forwarding
the client's email, so the client never needs to know the address.

**A reply opened a new ticket instead of joining the old one. Why?**

None of the matching rules found the earlier ticket, often because the mail client dropped the thread's headers and the
subject changed. Forward it again with the ticket number, such as `SAW-123`, in the subject.

**Does By Dawn reply to the client?**

No. By Dawn only reads the email. Reply to the client from your own mail client.

**What happens to mail sent to the old address after I replace it?**

It bounces. Mail that arrived before the change stays in **Recent email**, marked **old address**.

## Next

- [Tickets and sub-tickets](https://docs.bydawn.com/tickets/): work the tickets your email opens.
- [Bind a channel](https://docs.bydawn.com/chat-channels/): take requests from Slack, Discord or Teams too.

Source: https://docs.bydawn.com/email-intake/