Forward emails to Tidio (Helpdesk)

At Tidio, you can automatically forward emails from other mailing providers directly to the Tidio panel. With this Helpdesk feature, you can receive all your incoming emails inside Tidio, as tickets - and manage them through the Tickets folder.

If you want to learn more about our Helpdesk tool in general, head over to this detailed article.

 

In this article, you'll learn:

• The benefits of using Helpdesk
• How to forward emails to Tidio from the most common email providers
• How to complete the setup (adding your business domain and sender address)
• How to cancel email forwarding
• How to troubleshoot common forwarding issues

 

 

Helpdesk benefits

 

Manage your time

Move time-consuming conversations to tickets to save the efforts of handling complaints, queries, and requests via chats. Change tickets' statuses and keep your inbox squeaky clean.

 

Create an omnichannel support

Offer your customers more ways to interact with you. Omnichannel support connects the experiences across different channels, making the customer experience completely seamless. 

 

Set priorities for your tickets

Assign the priority to the tickets based on the SLA policy.

 

Cooperate with your colleagues

Assign the tickets to the team members who are best-suited to handle them. For example, a ticket with pricing questions can be assigned to an agent with relevant sales expertise. Create a team of ticket owners responsible for resolving them in the shortest turnaround time. 

 

Add notes and tags to improve communication 

Help your coworkers out by leaving notes regarding each ticket, as well as tagging your tickets with useful information.

 

 

Adding your mailbox to Tidio

 

In general, completing your setup requires 3 different steps:

1. Connecting your mailbox (or several mailboxes)
2. Connecting your own business domain
3. Setting a proper sender address (which uses your connected domain)

 

This will ensure you (and your customers!) enjoy the full benefit of Helpdesk experience.

Please see the instructions for connecting your mailbox below. See this next section of our guide to learn about business domain connection and the sender address.

 

You can add your external mailbox (or multiple mailboxes) by heading to the Settings > Helpdesk section in your Tidio admin panel:

 

 

 

... and by clicking on one of the blue Connect mailbox buttons:

 

 

 

You will see a popup with three options to choose from: Connect with your existing email, Create a new email address (using Tidio's domain), or Connect Gmail account:

 

 

 

Connect with your existing email 

Use this option when you want to forward emails from your existing email address. Type in your email address and hit Next:

 

 

 

In the next step, you will get detailed instructions for setting up the connection. You can select from the most common providers (e.g. Gmail or Outlook):

 

 

 

Selecting one of the listed options will give you step-by-step instructions on connecting your mailbox. If you're not using Gmail, Google Apps, Outlook, or Office 365 - select Other mailbox provider. This will simply provide you with your Tidio forwarding address immediately:

 

 

 

As with Gmail or Outlook, you will need to use this unique forwarding address in your mailbox configuration. Once you've done that properly, the newly added mailbox will become verified inside the Mailbox tab, and all your incoming emails will start appearing inside Tidio's Tickets folder.

 

 

 

Create a new email address

Use this option only when you don't have an email address or when you want to create a new email address with Tidio, specifically for the purpose of forwarding only. This email address will be using the @tidio.xyz domain. You will be able to type in the alias only:

 

 

 

Once you hit Next, you will see your newly-created address listed in the Mailbox tab, and verified for use right away:

 

 

 

Connect Gmail account

The last (and quickest!) option is to use an existing Gmail account that you have access to - this integration doesn't require any actual setting up. Just select the Connect Gmail account option and follow the steps: sign into Gmail (or select one of the accounts you're already signed into), and confirm:

 

 

 

Once you finish these steps via Gmail, you will see your mailbox listed in the Mailbox tab, and verified for use right away:

 

 

 

 

 

To learn more about Tidio's Helpdesk overall, head over to this detailed article that covers all of its aspects.

 

 

Connect your domain and add a sender address

 

Apart from connecting your mailbox (or several mailboxes) in order to receive incoming emails in Tidio, it's important to complete your Helpdesk setup by adding your business domain as well as your sender address.

These two steps will let you benefit from Helpdesk fully, as your ticket responses will enjoy better deliverability in addition to looking more professional.

 

• To connect your own domain, please see this separate guide.
• To learn about configuring your sender address, please see this section of our general Helpdesk guide.

 

 

Cancel email forwarding 

 

Go to the Settings > Helpdesk > Mailbox section in your Tidio panel to cancel email forwarding. On the far right of the mailbox you want to disconnect - hit the Delete button: 

 

 

Confirm your choice, and your mailbox will be removed from the panel.

 

Please note: if you've added your mailbox to Tidio with the Connect with your existing mailbox option, deleting the mailbox alone does not disable forwarding! Removing the mailbox from the list will only disable forwarding immediately if you used the Create a new email address or Connect Gmail account options.

To disable forwarding completely, you need to remove your unique Tidio forwarding address from your external mailbox settings (e.g. in Gmail, Outlook, or other). The steps towards this are slightly different for each provider.

 

 

Gmail

Log into your mailbox, click on the Gear icon in the dashboard, and select Settings.   

Choose the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab and select the Disable forwarding option, which will affect the email address you had added previously.

Please note: if you used the dedicated Connect Gmail account option when setting up Helpdesk, then all you need to do is remove the mailbox from your Helpdesk list.

 

 

Outlook.com and Office 365:

Select the Gear icon from the top-right corner of your Inbox and choose Options.

From the Options page, open the Forwarding tab in the Account section.

Select the Stop forwarding option and click Save.

 

 

Other email providers

Locate your forwarding settings and remove your unique @tidioreply.com email address from the configuration.

 

 

Troubleshooting forwarding issues

 

Below we address some common issues that users have experienced when setting up their Helpdesk.

 

Tidio confirmation email appears in mailbox, but not in Tidio panel

This is quite common when connecting Outlook, but may take place with some other providers as well.

When you first add your Tidio forwarding address to your mailbox settings, a confirmation email is automatically sent from Tidio. It should arrive in your newly connected mailbox (e.g. in Outlook), and a forwarded copy should also appear in your Tidio tickets inbox, confirming that the connection is working. In some cases, you might not see this email inside the Tidio panel. If you're sure that you've set up the Tidio forwarding address correctly in your mailbox, this issue may be addressed as follows:

1. The forwarding is actually done and working correctly, but the initial confirmation email hasn't been forwarded. You can test this by sending an email to your newly-connected mailbox; if it reaches both your mailbox and your Tidio panel, everything should be fine!
2. The confirmation email has been forwarded to the Tidio panel, but may have been marked as spam for some reason; in this case, navigate to the Spam folder in your Tidio Inbox and see if the message is there. You can mark it as non-spam once you find it.

 

Outlook removes forwarding settings; mailbox remains unverified in Tidio

Some Outlook users may experience a bug where Outlook clears any forwarding settings that have recently been set up. This can result in the newly-added mailbox to be unverified in your Helpdesk settings.

While we cannot affect Outlook itself, we recommend a workaround that seems to fix this issue: instead of setting up the forwarding via browser, try the Outlook desktop app. When saving the configuration there, the forwarding settings aren't removed and your mailbox should be verified in your Tidio panel!