Introduction

LiveAgent helpdesk software allows you to connect your own email accounts and therefore have all your business emails stored in LiveAgent as tickets. Once you connect your mailbox with LiveAgent, your agents can respond to these emails directly from their LiveAgent panel without any need to use other 3rd party mailing system like outlook for example. You can connect as many mail accounts as you need, there are no limitations. Also if you wish to allow access to specific mail accounts only for specific agents in your LiveAgent software, you can use our departments feature to achieve that. This is most commonly used if you are providing support for multiple brands or businesses with a single LiveAgent account, or to differentiate between your own company departments like Sales, Technical, etc... 

Connecting your own mail account with LiveAgent

In order to connect new mail account, navigate to Configuration > Email > Mail accounts Here you will find a list of all already connected mail accounts and you can also connect new mail accounts by clicking Add mail account button.

After pressing the Add mail account button a new screen appears, here you can choose from few predefined email connectors for various mail providers like our Gmail account connector for example.
If you are using some other mail account provider or you want to connect your own mail server, you will need to select the Other method.

Options available under Other method are different for hosted LiveAgent accounts and standalone LiveAgent installations installed on your own servers.

• Hosted LiveAgent account offers you to set up a faster, direct connection via email forwarding and it also allows you to connect custom mail account via IMAP/POP3 and SMTP.
  
• Standalone LiveAgent installation offers custom IMAP/POP3 and SMTP connection as well. However the Forwarding option is replaced by email Piping.
  

Should I choose email Forwarding/Piping or IMAP/POP3

Choosing Forwarding or Piping is always better and much faster option in general. Emails are being automatically forwarded/piped into your LiveAgent account as soon as they are received, making them appear instantly in your LiveAgent panel. On the other hand IMAP/POP3 method has to periodically connect to your mail server and check if there are any new emails received. Only after new email is found, it is fetched into LiveAgent. Since it's a bit more complicated process, it is slower than forwarding/piping and there is also a greater room for possible errors. Most common issue is the connection problem between actual IMAP/POP3 mail server or some unusual mail server configurations.

If Forwarding/Piping option is out of the table and you have to use IMAP or POP3 connection method, it's always preferred to use IMAP since it's technically more advanced than POP3. POP3 creates local copies of emails and deletes the originals from the mail server, the emails are tied to the machine/service that read them, and cannot be accessed via any other webmail client or any service on other computers/servers. At least, not without doing a lot of email forwarding or porting around mailbox files. Compared to POP3, IMAP allows users to log into many different email clients or webmail interfaces and view the same emails, because the emails are kept on remote email servers until the user deletes them.

Periodicity of email fetching by LiveAgent if IMAP/POP3 method is used

- applies from version 4.14.x.x

• If you have 1 to 5 mail accounts configured, then the delay between each fetching of emails is at most 3 minutes.
• If you have 5 to 20 mail accounts configured, then the delay between each fetching of emails is at most 6 minutes.
• If you have 20 and more mail accounts configured, then the delay between each fetching of emails is at most 30 minutes.

The above mentioned times are the maximum times between fetching and the real times depend on the email account activity. Active accounts are checked more frequently than the less active ones.