E-mail notifications are a complex feature and probably the most difficult to debug because it depends on various things external to the plugin.

However, there are a few things that you can do in order to ensure a high deliverability of all e-mails.

E-Mail Notifications Settings

You will find the e-mail notifications settings in the plugin’s settings page, under the “E-Mails” tab.

The plugin has 5 types of e-mail notifications:

• Submission confirmation: e-mail sent to a user after he submitted a ticket
• New assignment: e-mail sent to an agent when a new ticket just got assigned to him
• New reply from agent: e-mail sent to the client after an agent replied to his ticket
• New reply from client: e-mail sent to the agent after the client replied to the ticket
• Ticket closed: e-mail sent to the client after his ticket was closed

Each notification can be enabled or disabled anytime by checking / unchecking the “Enable” checkbox. An e-mail notification will only be sent if the corresponding case is enabled.

For each notification, 2 options are available: e-mail subject and e-mail content. Even though all options come pre-defined, you can change it as you please. All e-mails are sent as HTML, meaning that you can add styling to the e-mail content.

In addition to regular textual content, you can use template tags to enhance the notifications with dynamic content (see below).

Template Tags

Template tags are pieces of text wrapped inside curly brackets ({}). When used in the e-mail subject line or body, these tags will be converted into their actual value right before the e-mail is sent out.

To use template tags, simple place them in the e-mail subject or body where you want the dynamic content to appear. For instance, if you want to greet your client with his own name, you can set the e-mail subject as follows:

Hi {client_name}!

Before the e-mail is sent, {client_name} will be converted into the actual client’s name. The client will get an e-mail saying, for instance:

Hi John!

The list of available tags can be seen in the plugin. You won’t find it here because we will forget to update it when new tags are added. Instead, go to the e-mail notifications settings page and click the “Help” tab on the top right hand corner, then select “Template Tags”.

E-Mail Delivery

E-mail delivery is the trickiest part. By default, all e-mails are sent through your hosting server using the mail() function of PHP. The problem is that it is not a reliable solution for two reasons:

• Some hosting providers will limit the number of e-mails that can be sent through the mail() function,
• A hosting server is not optimized to send out e-mail

This may result in e-mail notifications not being sent, or not being received (these are two very different things). Awesome Support has the capability to know if an e-mail was sent, but that doesn’t mean that it has been received.

In order to bypass this problem, it is highly recommended to use a dedicated transactional e-mail routing service. What we use for Awesome Support, and what you should use too, is Mailgun. This service is very easy to setup, it is very efficient, and it has a free plan for up to 10,000 emails per month.