Automated Senders

Why It Exists

Some email is sent by a machine, not a person: a backup service's alerts, a security plugin's scan results, an uptime monitor, and the update emails every WordPress website sends ("Some plugins were automatically updated"). Left alone, each one becomes a ticket in your Inbox, and the requests your clients send get lost among them. Automated Senders keeps that mail without letting it into your ticket queue.

What Happens to Their Email

Helpdesk never throws mail away. Email from a sender on your Automated Senders list:

• Is kept in full (its formatting, pictures, and attachments) as a ticket, filed Closed at once with the reason "Automated email, filed automatically." It is in the Closed and All tabs of the Inbox, and search finds it.
• Gets no receipt, and nothing is ever sent back to the sender.
• Tells nobody on your team, unless it reports a problem (below).
• Joins an earlier ticket only by its own email headers, never by its subject, so an update email never lands on a client's ticket. A later email from the same conversation is added to that ticket without opening it again.
• Says on the ticket which rule filed it.

Only mail that passes the sender checks is filed this way. An email that only claims to be from a sender on the list comes to the Inbox like anyone's, so nobody can hide a message by writing a listed address. Spam, calendar notices, read receipts, and your own system's mail keep their own handling.

When It Reports a Problem

When an automated email reports a problem, owners and admins get one notice in their notifications (the bell), linking the ticket. Nobody is emailed. Helpdesk reads the subject and the start of the message for:

• Malware or a security problem: malware, hacked, infected, a backdoor or phishing, a blocklist, a vulnerability.
• A website down or broken: down, offline, not responding, an outage, a critical or fatal error, WordPress's "Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue".
• A failed update, backup, or restore: "Background Update Failed", "Some plugins have failed to update", a backup or restore that failed.

A report that all is well ("Backup completed successfully", "No malware found") is not a problem. The same problem for the same website from the same rule within a day is one notice: the later emails count up, and each one's ticket says it was the same problem as the first, so a service that repeats itself every hour is still one notice.

The List

In Helpdesk's Settings, select Automated Senders (owners and admins, actions helpdesk.automated.list, helpdesk.automated.add, and helpdesk.automated.clear). Each rule is a sender and, if you like, a phrase the subject must have:

• An email address, such as alerts@example.com: only that address.
• A domain, such as example.com: everyone at that domain and its subdomains.
• A name at any domain, such as wordpress@: that name at every domain, for the emails every WordPress website sends from its own domain.
• Subject has (optional): only that sender's email whose subject has the phrase, such as wordpress@ with update, so a website's contact form, which may also send from wordpress@, still comes to your Inbox.

Type the sender, and the phrase if you want one, then select Add. Select Take Off beside a rule, and that sender's next email comes to your Inbox again; tickets already filed stay as they are. Your own Helpdesk addresses can never be on the list.

Bringing in a List

A list kept in the system you used before can be brought in once with Helpdesk's other settings (Helpdesk Settings). A rule already on your list, or one a person here took off, is left as it is, so bringing the list in again changes nothing and never undoes a choice made here. Rules brought in say Brought in. Every change is in your Activity Log.