From a shared inbox to ticketing
A shared inbox works until requests get lost, duplicated or answered twice. This guide covers the signs you have outgrown it and the steps to move to a ticketing system without disrupting the people who email you.
Signs you have outgrown the inbox
If one or two people handle a handful of emails a day, a shared inbox is fine and a ticketing system adds little. The signs below usually appear as volume, team size or the number of people being supported grows.
- Two people answer the same email, or nobody does because each assumes the other has it.
- You cannot tell who owns a message without asking around.
- Urgent items are buried under newer mail, because priority lives in people’s heads rather than on the message.
- Nobody can say how long replies take without counting by hand.
- Requesters email again to ask for an update, because they cannot see progress.
- History is lost on handoff: when someone is out, the thread is a forward chain that the next person has to piece together.
- A new colleague needs weeks of explanation before they can answer mail safely.
What ticketing adds
A ticketing system turns each request into a record with one owner, a status, a priority and a history. That record is what makes the rest possible.
Ownership comes first: every request has an assignee, and a queue shows what is unowned. A priority on the record lets you set response and resolution targets and watch them count down (the IT SLA guide explains how to choose them). Colleagues can discuss a request in internal notes without it reaching the requester, and two emails about the same problem can be merged into one record. A portal gives requesters a place to look at status without anyone writing an update.
Steps to make the move
- Write down how mail is handled today. Who reads it, how it is sorted, and what counts as urgent. This becomes your first set of priorities and types.
- Keep the first setup small. A handful of priorities, a few request types and a short list of statuses are enough. You can add more once real tickets show what you need.
- Set response and resolution targets you can actually meet, not ones you hope to meet.
- Create a mailbox and forward your support address to it. The next section shows how this works in ActiveQ.
- Run both for a week. Forward a copy and keep the original inbox as it is, so nothing is lost while you check that mail arrives as tickets.
- Add your people. Contacts and organizations can be brought in from a spreadsheet, so requesters are recognised from their first message.
- Tell requesters what changes. The address they write to can stay the same. Point them to the portal if you have one.
- Retire the old inbox as a working place once the team is answering from the queue.
How email intake works in ActiveQ
Email reaches ActiveQ by forwarding. You create a mailbox in ActiveQ, which gives you an address, and you forward your existing support address to it. ActiveQ does not log in to your current inbox and read it.
Start under Settings, then Channels, then Mailboxes, and choose New mailbox. Each workspace has a default mailbox, and you can have up to 20. The address starts with your workspace’s short name, followed by a dot and the part you choose for extra mailboxes, and it ends at ActiveQ’s mail domain.
The New mailbox dialog has a section called “Forward your own support address” with instructions for Google Workspace or Gmail, Microsoft 365 and other providers. In Google that is a routing rule or a forwarding address. In Microsoft 365 it is a mail flow rule, or forwarding on a shared mailbox. With another provider it is forwarding, a redirect or an alias. The same instructions appear in the setup guide.
A mailbox can set the team, the organization (for a mailbox that belongs to one client), a default type and a default priority for new tickets. For unknown senders you either create a contact or hold their mail in quarantine for review. Replies can come from the mailbox address, or from an address at a sending domain you have verified, and a new requester can get a short automatic confirmation that their message arrived.
When someone replies to an email that ActiveQ sent, the reply is added to the same ticket. If that ticket was resolved, the reply reopens it. If it was closed, the reply starts a new ticket. Settings, Channels also has tabs for Quarantine, where held messages wait for a decision, and for Blocked and suppressed senders.
Bringing your people across
ActiveQ can import contacts and organizations from a CSV file or from text pasted from a spreadsheet. The import lets you match your columns, previews every row, and lets you choose whether people who already exist are left alone or have their empty fields filled in. The limit is 2,000 rows and 1 MB at a time, and nothing is imported while a row has a problem.
This import covers people and organizations, so history in your old inbox or tool stays where it is.
When you are ready, see pricing, the internal IT help desk page or read how to set up a client portal. Terms such as shared inbox and ticket triage are explained in the glossary.