Support

Are both email categories aliases to same email inbox? If they are not aliases but individual email inboxes or forwards then the email fetch won't work. In these cases the inbox to which ATS connects does not have any emails or has emails with the wrong sender address.

The same goes for the senders of the emails. The email addresses must match exactly the email address in the user record on the Joomla! site. This can get a bit complicated. For example a user registers with [email protected] but his email sender address is always [email protected]. There is an address mismatch so the email is ignored. Or more typically you get someone subscribe with [email protected] and then send you emails from [email protected]. Also email address mismatch, also no go.

Please note that only unread messages will be parsed. If the message has been marked as read it will be ignored. If you have another email client / web mail reading those messages that could be it.

If you have switched to a different email inbox or mail server please note that messages may be ignored. The only way to prevent double posts / double tickets from the same email message is keeping track of the message IDs. Unfortunately, these are NOT globally unique. They are unique in a mailbox. When you move to another mailbox or mail server it is absolutely certain that new emails will have the same message IDs as older emails on the old server / mailbox. As such they will be ignored. Unfortunately there is no work around this. It will either be the way it is now or you'll end up with the same email message resulting in multiple tickets / posts being created in ATS. We genuinely chose the lesser of two evils.

They are mentioned in the documentation but not in the same place. There are bits in the category configuration, bits in the component Options and other bits in the plugin/CRON job documentation. Hm, I'll have to fix that.

What is the best setup approach for allowing anyone to email a question that is recorded as a ticket by ATS? Sounds like a dedicated mailbox is needed that is not monitored by another other clients to ensure that it remains unread. Aliases here could allow multiple flows but for the moment, let concentrate on the single flow from any user. I need this to work for unregistered users.

First create a single, new mailbox for ATS. One that's not used by anyone or anything else. For example [email protected]

Then create one or more aliases for this mailbox, e.g. [email protected] and [email protected].

Edit each support category. There's the "Category email" option in the "Akeeba Ticket System - General" tab. Enter the email alias you want to use for this category, e.g. [email protected] for Category 1, [email protected] for Category 2.

I need this to work for unregistered users.

This is not possible with ATS. It requires a Joomla! user account to be already present. Each ticket is owned by a Joomla! user. An unregistered "user" is not a user, it's a guest who has no user ID. If we allowed tickets to be filed by guests we'd have two problems:
1. It would be impossible to apply access control to a category allowing guests to post tickets and replies. Everybody would be able to read everyone else's ticket. And no, email address based authentication is not authentication at all. Email addresses are not passwords, they are usernames.
2. Anybody could edit everyone else's tickets and reply to them. Also, everyone would appear as "Guest" making it impossible for you to know who you're talking to. Not to mention that it would be nigh impossible for ATS to know who to email.

If we allowed user creation on guest ticket creation you'd end up with a massive backdoor for spammers. So no go either.

For these (and many more) reasons we are not going to ever implement a guest "user" ticket feature.