# Imap Overview

Overview

Imap accounts let you have tickets created by email. This enables you to post an email address as your support address.

How Does it Work?

Firstly, you need to create an imap account. This will be a standard mailbox. Next you need to set up a cron job to read the mailbox and check for emails. Once an email is found the system breaks the email down into options required by the support system. Subject, sender, message etc
When a person replies via email, the system attempts to identify this as a reply based on the ticket ID in the subject.
NOTE: The imap system CANNOT log two way communication as you cannot remotely access someone else's mailbox, so staff replies should NEVER be sent via email to an imap account as they will always create new tickets. All staff replies should be via the admin interface.
Attachments are supported if enabled and the same restrictions apply as for standard tickets.

Spam

With all mail accounts spam is potentially a problem. Some mail systems such as gmail have good spam filters and can help your ticket system being flooded with spam. Maian Support has a built in anti spam system called CleanTalk to help keep your helpdesk system clean from spam. More info here. Maian Support can also honour your spam score headers (eg: SpamAssassin), which does not require cleanTalk to be enabled. More info here
Maian Support also has ban filters so you can exclude tickets that contain certain data.

Mail Encoding

There may be issues with email that comes in encoded. Maian Support attempts to decode the message body via the PHP encode functions, however some emails may not be able to be decoded properly, resulting in garbled messages. Improvements will be made as options become available. Also, some foreign characters may not be rendered properly.

Cron Job Setups

More info here. You can also read the mailbox manually via your account area.

Memory Allocation

If your mailbox has a lot of emails the system may timeout. It is recommended you DO NOT use this feature on a shared server as resources are low. A VPS or dedicated server is recommended. It will be trial and error with the amount of messages you want to read in any one go. Also take into consideration that using the CleanTalk API may impact read speed as the email is analysed on their servers.