First of all, email piping is possible only with standalone LiveAgent installations.
E-mail piping is a powerful and fast option to fetch e-mails from your own mail server into your LiveAgent installation. Compared to periodical IMAP/POP3 account polling, e-mails are fetched instantly as they arrive to your mail server. There is no delay between receiving e-mails to your mail server and receiving them in your LiveAgent. There is also another great advantage, and that is the fact, that there is no need to have a physical e-mail account from which the e-mails are to be piped. If your domain is e.g. www.mygreatsite.com and you wish to provide support to your customers, then you can simply have the customers to send the emails to customercare@mygreatsite.com because you can have such address piped directly to LiveAgent. In this article, we will show you, how to set up e-mail piping through a cPanel.
Piping itself doesn't actually support sending of emails. For that purpose you will have to set an actual SMTP connection to your SMTP mail account on your server during the configuration of email piping in your LiveAgent panel.
The very first step is, to decide, what e-mail address you would like to have regarding support. In our example, we choose the e-mail address support@postaffiliatepro.com
So, let's start with logging in to LiveAgent panel and navigating to Configuration > Email > Mail Accounts > Add mail account > Other > Piping. At this page LiveAgent provides you a code(yellow field on the screenshot below), more exactly a path to the script handling the e-mail piping on LiveAgent's side. This path also includes a special ID at the end. Copy the whole path LiveAgent gives you, because you will be needing it during the configuration of the actual piping on your server.
Now we can proceed to the actual configuration of email piping on your server. The exact way to configure it on your server depends entirely on your hosting and your server type. In this guide we we will show you how it's done in the most used server panel cPanel, that is currently being used by majority of hosting providers. If you are not using cPanel on your server, please ask your server admin or your hosting company to help you with the actual configuration of email piping on your server.
Lets start by logging into your cPanel and looking up the menu item called Forwarders that is located in the Email section. Feel free to use the search section of your cPanel to look it up even faster.
Clicking on the Forwarders menu will open it's actual configuration screen. Here you can see a list of all currently configured email forwarders and edit them if needed. We are here to add a new forwarder so lets click on Add Forwarder button.
Now we are on a screen where we define the actual new forwarder.
First step is to define the desired e-mail address from which we will be forwarding all emails to your LiveAgent software. If you have more than one domain from your hosting, you will need to select the email domain from the domain list as well.
Next step is to click on Advanced Options button and select option Pipe to a Program and put the whole piping path that we copied from LiveAgent panel during the first step of this guide. After that click Add Forwarder button.
If you have done everything correctly a confirmation window will show up.
Piping is now successfully set on your server, so lets navigate back to your LiveAgent panel and activate email Piping by clicking the Save button at the bottom of email piping configuration screen.
After clicking the Save button, LiveAgent tries to send a test mail via defined SMTP mail account to the email address from which it is supposed to be forward back. If the test email is sent without any problems and also piped back to LiveAgent by your server you will see a success message. From this moment email piping is enabled in your LiveAgent installation.