Email is a big part of the communications in Staff.Wiki, so it's important to set this up correctly in order to be able to receive and send email through your portal.

If you're using the cloud service, then this will be done for you. If you're installing Staff.Wiki privately then you can follow this section to learn how to connect your portal with your email provider.

SMTP Settings

The SMTP settings are for sending email out from the portal. Again, if you're using the cloud version you won't need to worry about this, but if you're using it locally on your own network then you need to make sure that the SMTP server is set up before it will be able to send out any email.

The SMTP server is also set up on the Configuration tab, under Main Settings, in the following fields:

• EMail Server
• EMail Login
• EMail Password

 You can set that along with the "From Email", which is the address it will send the email from, and where any responses to the email will go to.

There are two types of SMTP server. Unsecure email servers typically use port 25, which is the default. But they can also use something called SSL or TLS, which uses a different port (usually 587). To use a different port, you put a colon and the port number after the server name. If it uses security, then you should also add :tls after the port number.

For GMail, for instance, TLS and authentication are required, so the server would be:

smtp.gmail.com:587:tls

The username and password would be your GMail email address and password respectively. Note, though, that Google requires you have a secure password (with a digit and symbol) - if you don't then it will refuse to authenticate you.

If you're still having trouble setting up your email server, then please contact support for assistance.

POP3 Settings

Staff.Wiki can use a mailbox to enable communication on tickets (such as the webchat) through email. In order to do this, it connects to an existing central inbox by polling the inbox using POP3. You should make sure that POP3 is enabled on the mailbox before setting this up.

Note: If you are using Google Apps or GMail, then you should prefix the username with recent: (the word recent and a colon) to ensure it returns messages in the correct order. 

You can edit the POP3 server settings in the Configuration tab, under Main Settings. You must be an administrator to do this. Just go to the Configuration tab and click edit, and the top section should contain the POP3 server settings to connect to.

This is the main POP3 server to connect to. You can also specify secondary servers to poll, in case you have multiple inboxes. You can do that in each department. The POP3 settings in the department are optional, though. If you don't specify it then it will use the main POP3 server settings.

It's usually a good idea to use either a "catch all" inbox, or an inbox with multiple aliases - one for each department address. In the department you should specify the email address that is used to contact that department directly. So long as the To email address of the incoming email matches what's in the department email, the email will be assigned to that department.

If it cannot find a match for the email address, it will use the default department.

Testing Email

There is a "Send Test Email" action available on the Configuration tab (click "Data View" first, then access it on What's Next). This lets you send out a test email from the system, to help you troubleshoot email sending issues.