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Are there best practices for setup of incoming email?

Environment:

All versions. Incoming mail, techmail, POP, SMTP

Resolution:

With proper setup, techmail can handle huge volumes of mail with little intervention.  However improper setup and design of your site can lead to complicated processes which are prone to failure.

Here are some general practices for handling incoming mail with the techmail utility:

1. Have customers mail directly into the mailbox that techmail pops.

Techmail can pop hosted mailboxes (with a custhelp.com address) and external mailboxes with your own domain address.

2. If using SMTP forwarding, always forward mail with no changes to the email.

Email should always come into techmail with the "Reply to" address of the customer (contact). The full domain should be used for the mailbox: popaccount1@mail<pod>.custhelp.com (in lieu of popaccount1@custhelp.com).  Examples include popaccount1@mailph.custhelp.com or popaccount1@mailgb.custhelp.com.

3. Use individual incoming mailboxes for each interface (each brand or language) and if possible each incident queue.

Each interface has a techmail process therefore a greater volume of mail can be handled.  Oracle RightNow pop accounts should be enabled for incoming mail on one and only one interface.  Mailboxes with the same email address (pop account) can be enabled for outgoing mail on multiple interfaces but can only be enabled for incoming mail on one interface.

4. Always create unique subject lines for each email coming from automated systems such as web forms.

Multiple incidents with the same email address will slow duplicate checking therefore all subject lines should be unique.

5. Always use the original email address for any email coming from automated systems such as web forms.

Set the "Reply to" address of the automatically created email to that of the contact associated to the issue. Do not create many automated incidents a day (> 20) with the same from address as these incidents will be filtered by loop prevention functions.

6. Do not change the default configurations for email gateway (EGW_*) without careful review.

The default settings are set to ensure your site is resistant to email loops and spam mail.

7. Even if you are not currently using email as a support channel, always collect an email address when creating a new contact. 

An email address helps define a unique contact and allows proper email handling should your organization decide to use email in the future.

8. When an incident is first created, use rules to assign incidents to incident queues.  

A simple rule (that is scalable) for this purpose is to select techmail incidents and then set mail from specific mailboxes to specific incident queues.  Refer to the following answer for more incident rule best practices.  Answer ID 2205: Best practices for setting up incident rules .