Not sure where to place this. I work now in a small company with only internal users to support. The whole IT has one global mail address where everything comes in, including newsletter.
Cause of my god impression in my former job (only user), I tried to convince them to use Zammad but currently I do not have any chance. "It works, No need to add complexity, ".
Is there a reasonable way to install Zammad community edition, import this global mail account and get a fast glance how Zammad would work and handle our mail account with all it’s sub-directorys in a read-only mode?
Generally, one mail account for everything is not that big of a deal. Even with mail filtering and stuff.
However… Mail accounts in Zammad work a little bit different from what you’re expecting. Zammad reads on one folder, not several ones. Also not exactly read only. In this case, you’d be looking to keep the messages on the server, however, this also means that Zammad will ignore everything that has been marked as read.
The best and easiest approach -especially for “just testing” and playing around initially- is to use an independent email account. No matter if you’re using the SaaS Trial or On Premise for that.
This also reduces risks to accidently answer to customers or (the classical mistake) to send out a bulk of trigger based auto replies during the first import etc.
TL;DR: Use a productive account when you’re going productive - it makes your life much easier.
Such Tests happens in an testing environment without internet access.
The directories seems are a problem. the concept in our case is an empty inbox. So we distribute every thing in around 50 directories 20 in highest level and 30 in sub-directories. I hoped we could import these directories as tags.
based on what I see in my own setup, it might be possible to implement such a function in Zammad — but it would require quite a bit of effort.
In the Mail settings of Zammad, there’s an option to fetch only one specific folder from a mailbox.
However, it’s important to note that this only works with user mailboxes, not with shared mailboxes.
(Unfortunately, Zammad doesn’t currently support retrieving emails from shared mailboxes.)
With this limitation in mind, you could technically create a separate “email account” for each tag or folder and then use triggers to assign the appropriate tag.
Just be aware that these triggers have no real logic or intelligence — they simply execute in a very linear, rule-based way.
So with many different tags and triggers, things could get messy or prone to errors.
I also can’t say how Zammad behaves with subfolders, as I haven’t worked with that use case myself.
If needed, the structure of the mailbox may have to be adjusted to fit this approach.
Since there shouldn’t be any manual interaction with folders that are managed by Zammad anyway, that part shouldn’t be a major issue.
I’m still on 6.4.1 and haven’t updated yet – but it’s great to hear that this works in 6.5!
I had only seen that it works with M365, so I didn’t expect it to work with an on-premises Exchange server as well.
But in any case, that’s not really the main topic of mannshoch’s post — just an interesting side note.
