Turn emails into tickets (email intake)

If customers already email your support address out of habit, you don’t have to make them switch to the portal — turn on email intake and every message that reaches your dedicated Essential Support address becomes a ticket automatically. You just add one forwarding rule from your real support inbox.

Turn on email intake

Click the gear icon, then in the left-hand Settings navigation choose Channels, then open the Email intake sub-tab.
Turn on the Enable inbound email toggle. The first time you enable it, Essential Support generates a unique ingest address for this workspace in the form es_in_<random>@in.essential.support — you don’t choose this address, it’s generated for you.
The address now appears in the Forward your support email to field. Click Copy to copy it to your clipboard.

Forward your support inbox to it

Essential Support never connects to or reads your support mailbox directly — mail only arrives once your provider forwards it. Add one forwarding rule from your existing support address (e.g. support@yourcompany.com) to the address you just copied.

Google Workspace / Gmail

In Gmail, open Settings (gear icon) → See all settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
Click Add a forwarding address and paste the es_in_…@in.essential.support address.
Gmail sends a confirmation message to that address to verify you own it. Since it isn’t a real inbox, check the Recent intake log described below — the confirmation email will appear there as a rejected/unread entry — or contact Essential Support support if you can’t complete this confirmation step.
Once confirmed, choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to the new address and save. For a shared support alias or Google Group, set the rule at the group level rather than on one person’s inbox.

Microsoft 365 / Outlook

In Outlook on the web, open Settings → Mail → Forwarding.
Enable Forward my email, paste the es_in_…@in.essential.support address, and choose whether to keep a copy of forwarded messages in the original mailbox.
Save. If this is a shared mailbox, set the same rule in the Microsoft 365 admin center instead, so it doesn’t depend on one person’s account.

Any other provider

Any mailbox or help desk that supports mail forwarding works the same way: add a rule that sends a copy of every incoming message on your support address to the es_in_…@in.essential.support address. A true forwarding rule — not one that rewrites or strips the original sender — works best, since Essential Support reads the original From address to identify the customer.

Confirm it’s working

Send a test email to your support address from a personal account.
Wait a minute for it to forward through, then go back to Settings → Channels → Email intake.
Look under Recent intake for a new row with an outcome of created, then check your portal’s ticket list to confirm the ticket appeared.

What the Recent intake log shows

Every message that reaches your ingest address is logged here — even ones that didn’t become a ticket — with the sender (From), the Subject line, the Outcome, and When it arrived. Outcomes you may see:

created — a new ticket was opened.
threaded — the message was added to an existing ticket as a reply (see below).
verify_sent — the sender wasn’t a known customer and unknown senders currently require confirmation first; a confirmation link was emailed to them instead of opening a ticket immediately (see “Let unknown senders open tickets by email”).
duplicate — the same message was delivered more than once by the provider and was safely ignored.
rejected — nothing was created. Common reasons: empty (no text and no attachment), rate_limited (too many messages from one sender, or into one workspace, within an hour), sender_disabled (that customer was disabled by an admin), spf_dkim_fail (the message failed both SPF and DKIM checks, so it was blocked as likely spoofed), or unknown_token (it arrived at an address that doesn’t match your current ingest address — usually because a forwarding rule still points at an old, regenerated address).

How replies thread automatically

You don’t need to do anything for replies to land in the right ticket. Every notification Essential Support sends about a ticket uses a Reply-To address unique to that ticket, and the ticket’s short reference code (e.g. (A7K2M9Q)) appears in the subject line. When the same customer’s email address replies — whether by hitting Reply-To or by keeping the reference code in the subject — the message is added to that ticket instead of opening a new one. A reply from a different address than the original customer is treated as new mail rather than merged into their ticket.