FAQs

Autotask PSA can accept messages that have up to 10 MB in attachments. The 10 MB limit also applies to the API.

Due to encoding, however, messages which are close to 10 MB may be rejected or appear to be larger in the NDR. When the application rejects an email, you may see the following error message: "reason: 552 6.3.0 Message size exceeds fixed maximum message size."

Including attachments, incoming emails cannot exceed 30 MB. Larger emails will be rejected and not added as either notes or tickets.

Conversion of emails to tickets is not an instantaneous event. When we receive an incoming email, it is queued up and subjected to two separate asynchronous processes.

1. The first step is to determine the zone and Autotask instance the email belongs to.
2. The second step is to determine which entity the email will be converted into (new ticket? task note?), which organization and contact it will be associated with, and the actual creation of the entity.

Depending on the day of the week and time of the day, both services can be more or less busy. Autotask would like to set the following expectations:

• If incoming emails are processed in 10 minutes or less, the service is working within specified parameters and there is no actionable support issue.
• Occasional processing times longer than 10 minutes are to be expected. If it frequently or for an extended period of time takes between 10 and 30 minutes to process an email, Autotask will monitor the service and intervene as needed.
• If ticket creation takes more than 30 minutes, Autotask will consider it an unacceptable degradation of service and take steps to remedy the situation.

Please inform customers and staff who use Incoming Email Processing of the expected delays between firing off an email and ticket creation to set the right expectations, and factor them into your service level agreements.

To prevent the addition of a lot of repetitive information to Autotask, emails are truncated as follows:

1. When Autotask parses the email body, anything including and after the first character of the following string will be stripped.

*** Please enter replies above this line ***

When using Add Ticket Email Service (ATES) with a third party email parser, use this text instead.
---------------Please ensure your reply is typed above this line for proper processing---------------

2. The email headers will be appended to the Description field of tickets, ticket notes, project notes, and tasks if Append email header information is selected on the mailbox configuration page. If this checkbox is not selected, email headers are omitted.

Refer to Append email header information.

Many incoming emails contain Rich Text formatting and images that illustrate the customer issue. The images can be inline images, or attachments to the email.

The incoming email processor will support Rich Text and images as follows:

• If the email body contains bold, italics, underlines, bulleted lists, or numbered lists, this formatting is preserved when the body is converted to a ticket, ticket note, or task note, as long as the plain text portion of the email is less than 8000 characters, and the HTML content is less than 32,000. If the plain text is greater than 8,000 characters or the HTML content is greater than 32,000, the description will be saved as Plain Text.
• If Rich Text is stored, a plain text version of the content is stored as well, and used wherever Rich Text is not supported, for example in tables. On the Activity tab, if the plain text version of the note’s description is 2,100 characters or less, the Rich Text version is displayed. If the plain text version exceeds 2,100 characters, Plain text is displayed, and truncated at 2,000 with the Show more… link.
• Images attached to the email are converted to ticket, task, or note attachments.
• Inline images are retained. Autotask will attempt to place images in the same position as in the incoming email, but this may not always succeed.
• If inline images are edited or updated in contexts that do not support Rich Text (LiveMobile, API, Import/Update), they are converted to image attachments so they do not get lost.

Refer to The Rich Text editor.

Including the header, incoming messages are truncated at 8,000 characters.

• If entities that support The Rich Text editor are created (Ticket, Ticket Note, Task Note), the HTML formatting of the incoming email is preserved, as long as the plain text portion of the email is less than 8,000 characters, and the HTML content is less than 32,000.
• If the plain text is greater than 8,000 characters or the HTML content is greater than 32,000, the description will be saved as plain text.

Subject lines with over 250 characters are truncated.

To ensure an acceptable response time for all customers, Autotask has set an hourly limit on the number of incoming messages per Autotask instance. This limit is 1,000 messages per hour, but can be configured to a lower number for testing purposes. Once the threshold is reached, the 1,001st message will be bounced back to the originator with an appropriate message.

Incoming emails with large headers will be dropped by our mail control provider. The end user receives an undeliverable message. Below is an example of the text received:

EXAMPLE  cluster-h.mailcontrol.com rejected your message to the following email addresses:
servicedesk.xxx.co.uk@email.uk.autotask.net
The email system had a problem processing this message. It won't try to deliver this message again.
cluster-h.mailcontrol.com gave this error: Headers too large (32768 max)

Two notifications were sent out, one by incoming e-mail processing and one by a workflow rule. To prevent duplicates, disable one of them. Refer to:

• The Workflow Rules page. Under the General tab, uncheck the box labeled Active. Alternatively, you can click the Notifications tab and uncheck the Ticket Contact box.

• Configuring a custom mailbox. Under the Ticket tab, find the section labeled SUCCESS NOTIFICATION (TO EMAIL ORIGINATOR). See if there is a template listed in the Notification Template box. If there is, you can remove it by clicking the down arrow and choosing the blank space at the top of the list. Click Save & Close at the top of the window to save your change.