One of the few differences between Deskpro Cloud and Deskpro On-Premise is how emails are handled. Both Deskpro Cloud and Deskpro On-Premise will send emails the same way, by connecting to your mail server and queuing messages to be sent. However, the method which they retrieve emails are different.

Deskpro On-Premise

For Deskpro On-Premise, your instance will act like a typical email client. You can configure your helpdesk to connect to your inbox using either POP3, IMAP or EWS (Exchange). Your Deskpro instance will connect to your mail server, download a copy of the mail from your inbox then either mark the messages as read, move them to another folder or delete them based on your configuration and settings.

As the diagram above shows, emails are sent to your mail server and are delivered to your inbox. Deskpro On-Premise will connect to your inbox to fetch the emails from there.

Deskpro Cloud

Deskpro Cloud handles emails differently to Deskpro On-Premise. When you create a new email account in Deskpro Cloud, we provide you with an <email>@<account>.deskpro.com email address. This email address exists on our mail servers and is automatically configured.

If you wish to use your own custom email address, you need to configure your email as a Forwarding Address on your mail server.

Please note, that this is not the same as setting up a mailbox rule to forward your emails to Deskpro, as there are slight changes to the behaviour.

Forwarding Address [Correct]

In this diagram, the emails are correctly configured as a Forwarding Address. When the user sends an email to your mail server, the mail server identifies it as a forwarding address and forwards the email on to the Deskpro mail server. Deskpro Cloud then collects the mail from our mail servers and processes it as normal.

Using this method, all the details from the original email are kept, so Deskpro just sees it as an email it's received directly.

Mailbox Rule [Incorrect]

In this diagram, the emails are incorrectly configured as a mailbox rule. The path of the email now goes into the inbox for your mail server before going back out and being forwarded to Deskpro's mail server. This creates a copy of the email instead of sending the original email, and creating this copy changes certain parts of the email which cause issues when Deskpro is trying to process it.

The main issue that this method causes is it changes the sender's address on the email to the one they sent the email to.

Example

The user user@customer.com emails the address support@example.com, which forwards mail to support@example.deskpro.com

With a Forwarding Address

• The email is sent straight to support@example.deskpro.com, keeping all the original email's details.

With a Mailbox Rule

• The email is sent to the inbox for support@example.com.

• The mailbox rule for support@example.com sends a copy to support@example.deskpro.com, changing the sender from user@customer.com to support@example.com

Deskpro will refuse to process emails from email accounts it manages, to prevent infinite loops. The email sent through the Forwarding Address is received from user@customer.com and is processed normally, while the email sent through the Mailbox Rule is received from support@example.com and is rejected.