Help Desk How-To Guide

Setting Up Email-to-Ticket Workflows

Last updated: August 2, 2026 5 min read Intermediate

You can turn inbound emails into help desk tickets automatically by building a workflow with an Email trigger and the Create Help Desk Ticket action. When a message lands in a connected shared mailbox, the workflow checks any conditions you set, then creates a ticket with the subject, body, and sender mapped across. The Workflow Builder lives in the top toolbar Settings menu.

Before you start

  • Connected mailbox: a shared mailbox must be connected and syncing so that incoming emails are available as trigger records.
  • Permission: you need the workflow.create permission to build workflows.

Create the workflow

  1. Open the Settings menu (gear icon) in the top toolbar and choose Workflow Builder.
  2. Click Create to start a new workflow.
  3. Enter a Name, for example “Support Email to Ticket”, and an optional description.

Configure the trigger

  1. Set Trigger Source to Entity Event.
  2. Set Trigger Entity to Email.
  3. Set Trigger Event to Created, which fires whenever a new email syncs in.
  4. Optionally use the Target Shared Mailboxes selector to limit the workflow to specific mailboxes. Leave it empty to include all of them.

Add conditions (optional)

Conditions filter which emails trigger the workflow. Each condition combines a field, an operator, and a value, and all conditions must match. Useful email fields include the subject, the sender address, the recipient address, and the body text. Operators include contains, does not contain, equals, does not equal, starts with, ends with, regular expression match, is empty, and is not empty.

For example, to process only mail sent to your support address, add a condition where the recipient address contains support@yourcompany.com.

If your team already has open tickets, add a condition where Email Classification equals New Email. Without it, this workflow opens a second ticket every time a customer replies to one they already have. The next section covers the companion workflow that handles those replies.

Add the Create Help Desk Ticket action

  1. In the Actions section, click Add Action.
  2. Choose Create Help Desk Ticket as the action type.
  3. Set the ticket defaults:
    • Priority: Urgent, High, Medium, or Low.
    • Category: General, Billing, Technical, Account, Feature Request, Bug Report, or Other.
    • Channel: defaults to Email, which you can change if needed.
    • Agent: optionally assign a specific agent. Left blank, auto-assignment rules apply instead.

Map email fields onto the ticket

Field mappings control how email data flows into the ticket. Reference trigger fields with placeholder syntax.

  • Subject: {{trigger.subject}} maps the email subject to the ticket subject.
  • Description: {{trigger.body}} maps the email body, preferring HTML and falling back to plain text.
  • Sender email: {{trigger.from_address}} maps the sender. ISO Mate matches this to an existing contact or creates a new one automatically as the requester.

If you leave these mappings empty, the action falls back to the email’s own subject, body, and sender.

Enable and save

  1. Turn on the Enabled toggle.
  2. Click Create Workflow to save.

Route replies into the existing ticket

A reply to an existing ticket should not open a new one. Build a second workflow that recognizes replies and adds them to the ticket they belong to, so the conversation stays in one place.

Set it up the same way, with an Email trigger on Created and the same target mailboxes, then:

  1. Add a condition where Email Classification equals Reply to Existing Ticket. This matches messages carrying a ticket reference in the subject, or reply headers that point back to a message you sent from a ticket.
  2. Add the Extract Ticket References action. It scans the subject and body for reference numbers and stores them for the actions that follow. Leave the pattern empty to use the standard reference format.
  3. Add the Add Email to Conversation action. It appends the message to the matched ticket’s conversation thread as a reply from the sender, so your agents read it in order alongside their own replies. It needs no configuration of its own.
  4. Optionally also add Link Email to Ticket, which records the email under the ticket’s linked entities. Both actions read the same extracted references, so the order between them does not matter.

Two things stay deliberately unchanged when a reply is appended. The ticket status is not altered, so your own conventions decide what a reply means, and the SLA first response target is not satisfied, because a customer writing in is not an agent responding.

Once replies land in the conversation, the ticket is flagged on the Kanban board as awaiting your team and floats to the top of its column, so a pending response is hard to miss. See Using the Help Desk Kanban Board.

What happens when the workflow runs

  1. A new email arrives and syncs from the mailbox.
  2. The workflow evaluates the trigger conditions and proceeds when they all pass, or when none are set.
  3. A ticket is created with the mapped fields, and a unique reference and requester access token are generated.
  4. If no agent was set, auto-assignment rules are evaluated to route the ticket.
  5. If a default SLA policy exists, response and resolution due times are calculated.
  6. The originating email is linked to the ticket and an audit entry records the creation with the source marked as workflow email.

Monitor executions

Each run creates an execution record. Open the workflow detail page to review execution history, including status, timestamps, and the trigger record that started the run. For a broader introduction to triggers, actions, and placeholders, see the Workflow Automation Overview, and for every action in the catalog see Workflow Actions. To also send an automatic reply to the requester, continue with Setting Up Email Auto-Responder Workflows.

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