# Imap Overview

Overview

Imap accounts let you have tickets created by email. This enables you to post an email address as your support address.

How Does it Work?

Firstly, you need to create an imap acount. This will be a standard mailbox. Next you need to set up a cron job to read the mailbox and check for emails. Once an email is found the system breaks the email down into options required by the support system. Subject, sender, message etc
When a person replies via email, the system attempts to identify this as a reply based on the ticket ID in the subject.
Attachments are supported if enabled and the same restrictions apply as for standard tickets.

Spam

With all mail accounts spam is potentially a problem. Some mail systems such as gmail have good spam filters and can help your ticket system being flooded with spam. Maian Support also has a built in spam filtering system to help with spam. More info here. DO NOT use shared server mail accounts that are poorly filtered.

Mail Encoding

There may be issues with email that comes in encoded. Maian Support attempts to decode the message body via the PHP encode functions, however some emails may not be able to be decoded properly, resulting in garbled messages. Improvements will be made as options become available. Also, some foreign characters may not be rendered properly.

Cron Job Setups

More info here. You can also read the mailbox manually via your account area.

Memory Allocation

If your mailbox has a lot of emails the system may timeout. It is recommended you DO NOT use this feature on a shared server as resources are low. A VPS or dedicated server is recommended. It will be trial and error with the amount of messages you want to read in any one go.