Give a board its own mailbox and it becomes a shared support inbox: email sent to it becomes tickets, customer replies land on the right ticket automatically, and everything you send goes out as the board — never from an individual agent's personal address.
Two ways email reaches a board#
- Outlook (Microsoft) — connect the board's mailbox (a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox such as support@yourcompany.com, or the account you sign in with) under Board Settings → Mailbox & delivery. AspirePro reads that mailbox and sends replies as it. Nothing else to set up.
- Google Workspace, Gmail, or any other mailbox — AspirePro sends as a Google mailbox but never reads one, so incoming email arrives by forwarding: point a forwarding rule (or a filter) at the board's forwarding address, shown under Inbound email on the same page. Replies still go out as the board and thread normally on the customer's side.
Use one or the other for an Outlook (Microsoft) board. If forwarded copies arrive for a board that already reads its own mailbox, the settings page warns you (for 30 days after the last one): each email still becomes one ticket, but turn the forwarding rule off.
Use Test connection to confirm sending works before you go live. You can control whether inbound mail creates new contacts, and how it matches senders to companies.
Setting up forwarding from Gmail or Google Workspace#
- Copy the board's forwarding address from Board Settings → Mailbox & delivery → Inbound email.
- In Gmail, open Settings → See all settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP, click Add a forwarding address, and paste it.
- Gmail sends that address a confirmation. It never becomes a ticket — within a minute the confirmation link and code appear on the board's settings page. Click the link (or enter the code in Gmail).
- Back in Gmail, choose Forward a copy of incoming mail to that address and save. If only some mail should become tickets, use a filter instead (Create filter → Forward it to).
- Send a test email to your support address and watch it appear as a ticket.
Use Gmail's automatic forwarding or a filter — not the manual Forward button, which sends the message from your own address and is treated as the board's own mail.
If the forwarding address ever leaks, Regenerate address issues a new one; the old address keeps working for 24 hours so you have time to update the rule.
How inbound mail is handled#
- A reply to an existing ticket appends to that ticket's conversation.
- Anything else opens a new ticket on the board.
Threading is deliberate and reliable — AspirePro matches replies by the ticket reference every board email carries, by the mail provider's conversation ID, by the standard References/In-Reply-To headers, and by a [Ticket #0042] number in the subject — never by guessing from the sender's address. Forwarded mail keeps those headers, so a board fed by forwarding threads exactly the same way. It also guards against mail loops (auto-responders, its own addresses, its own replies echoed back by a forwarding rule) and ignores duplicate deliveries.
How replies find their ticket#
Every email a board sends carries a short ticket reference at the bottom (Ticket reference ap-…), plus the same code hidden in the message. It's unique to the ticket and can't be guessed, so a reply that quotes it lands on the right ticket even if the subject was changed or the customer's email app dropped the usual reply headers — and even if the ticket has since moved to another board.
A reply is matched, in order, by that reference, by the email conversation it belongs to, by the standard reply headers, and last by the [Ticket #0042] number in the subject.
Emails that only name the ticket number#
Ticket numbers are sequential, so anyone could write "Re: [Ticket #0042]". When an email matches only by the number in its subject, AspirePro checks who sent it:
- From someone already on the ticket (its contact, anyone who has emailed on it, anyone copied on it) or from the customer company's own email domain → it's added to the conversation as normal.
- From anyone else, or from an address whose domain failed its authenticity check (DMARC) → it's held. "The customer's own domain" means the domains on their company record and the domains people have written to the ticket from — not every address that was ever copied on it. It appears on the ticket as a private note marked Held, with Accept into conversation and Discard. Until you accept it, it isn't public, isn't quoted in replies, isn't offered as a CC, doesn't change the ticket's status, and doesn't trigger automations; its files stay off the Attachments tab.
- A contact blocked from opening tickets can't add to one this way either.
Accepting makes it a normal customer message, and its sender part of the conversation from then on.
An email sent to more than one board#
One email is one ticket in your organization: if a customer writes to two boards at once (support@ and billing@, say), it's filed once, on the board that received it first. That message shows Also addressed to: Billing, and the other board's activity log records where it went — so nobody wonders why it never showed up there.
Moved tickets#
When a ticket moves to another board, replies the customer sends to the old board's address still land on the ticket — no duplicate ticket and no second acknowledgement.
"May have been sent"#
Occasionally a mailbox takes a reply and never confirms it went (usually a brief provider outage). AspirePro never resends it on its own — that could email the customer twice. The reply shows May have been sent: check the board mailbox's Sent folder, then choose It was sent or Send again. A reply that failed outright shows Not sent with Send again.
Website contact forms#
Many website forms email the board from the site's own address (for example wordpress@yoursite.com) and put the visitor's address in Reply-To. Left alone, every form submission would be filed as coming from the website.
List those form addresses under Board Settings → Mailbox & delivery → Website form senders — a full address, or a whole domain. Mail from a listed sender with exactly one Reply-To address is filed as that visitor: they become the ticket's contact, and the acknowledgement and your replies go to them. The conversation shows the form address beside their name as via wordpress@yoursite.com. Mail from anyone not on the list is filed exactly as sent.
A visitor can type any address into a form, so a form submission is never trusted to join an existing ticket by its number alone — one that names a ticket number is held for you to accept or discard. And because anyone can claim to be your form, the rewrite only happens when the form's own domain passes its authenticity check (DMARC); list your website's real sending address or domain, never a free-mail domain like gmail.com.
Senders are resolved to contacts (created automatically if you allow it), and their domain to a company (matched or created per the board's setting; generic free-mail domains never create a company).
Attachments and images#
- Files (PDFs, Office documents, spreadsheets, text and log files, zip archives, images, forwarded emails as
.eml/.msg, and more) are saved to the ticket's Attachments tab and to the message they arrived on — up to 10 files of 10 MB each per email. - Images shown in the body (pasted screenshots) appear in place in the conversation. An embedded photo too large to show inline is kept as a file instead.
- Small images the email doesn't show — almost always signature logos and social icons — are kept but hidden. The message offers them behind Show small images, so a genuinely small screenshot is never lost.
- Nothing is dropped without saying so. If a file isn't saved — too large, too many, a type that isn't accepted, or it couldn't be downloaded — the message says which file and why. When an Outlook (Microsoft) mailbox has a temporary problem handing over an attachment, AspirePro keeps trying on each check and shows retrying until it arrives.
Auto-acknowledgement#
When enabled, a board answers the customer's email with an acknowledgement under their own subject ("Re: …"), so it sits in the same conversation in their inbox. The ticket number is in the message itself, and the ticket reference at the bottom keeps their future replies attached to the ticket. The acknowledgement respects your board's exclusion list and per-contact preferences.
Acknowledgements, reminders, closing notices, surveys and automation emails are marked as automated, so out-of-office replies and auto-responders don't answer them — the usual start of a mail loop. Replies your agents write are not marked.
Sending as the board#
Every outgoing reply is sent as the board — through the board's Outlook (Microsoft) or Google connection, its SMTP settings, or the organization mailer — never an agent's personal mailbox. That means:
- The customer always sees a consistent, branded sender.
- Replies thread correctly on both sides.
- Outgoing email includes the recent conversation history (a configurable number of prior messages) so the customer has context.
Earlier messages quoted at the bottom of a reply keep their words; an image in them appears as [image: name] (small signature icons are left out), since the customer's email app can't open the copy stored in AspirePro.
Replies to an Outlook (Microsoft) board's customers go out with the same reply headers as every other email, so they join the customer's conversation even when the original email came in by forwarding or has since been moved.
Attachments up to 10 MB each send on every connection, including large files on Outlook (Microsoft) and Google. If the provider refuses an email for its size, the message says which file was too large and isn't retried — send a smaller file or share a link instead.
Replies queue and send in the background; the thread shows "Sending," then sent or failed. If a message fails to send, the error is shown on the message so you can retry.
Because sending is always board-based, your customers experience a single, professional support address — even though many agents work the queue behind it.