Departments

For whoever is running the desk.

A department is where a ticket lands and who gets told about it. Every ticket has exactly one, and almost everything about how a ticket behaves on arrival is decided here.

The settings that matter

Each department has its own page under the brand, with sections and an explicit save.

Who can pick it : Client-selectable departments appear on the new-ticket form. A staff-only department is an internal queue, staff can move a ticket into it, clients can never choose it.

Guests : Whether somebody without an account may open a ticket here. Off by default.

Members : The staff who see the department’s tickets and are notified about them. This is the notification list and the visibility list at once.

Public address : The address clients write to for this department. Mail sent to it routes here automatically. There is a separate switch for copying that address on new-ticket and unassigned-reply notifications, useful for a shared inbox the desk does not read, off by default.

Opening hours : With a timezone. The desk knows whether the department is open now, when it reopens, and can send a Markdown auto-reply to tickets that arrive out of hours. Response clocks understand business hours, so a ticket arriving on Friday evening is not overdue by Monday morning.

Priorities : Which priorities a client may choose, and the default. Each can carry a warning shown under the priority field the moment a client picks it (“Urgent is for production outages; billing questions are answered next working day”). It only warns (the ticket still goes through) and staff opening a ticket never see it.

Custom fields : Extra questions on the new-ticket form: text, long text, number, dropdown, checkbox, email, URL or date, each with a placeholder, help text, a validation pattern and a required flag. Answers travel with the ticket and are shown to staff beside it.

CC and credentials : Whether clients may copy other people on a ticket here, and whether the secure-credentials feature is offered.

How mail finds a department

In order:

1. A reply token in the address or subject: the ticket already exists, so the department is whatever the ticket’s is.
2. The address it was sent to matches a department’s public address, or a mailbox alias you have mapped.
3. The mailbox’s default department.
4. A rule on “ticket opened” can move it somewhere else after the fact, based on its content.

A useful shape

Most desks end up with something like:

• Support: client-selectable, guests allowed, wide hours.
• Billing: client-selectable, no guests, office hours, its own public address.
• Abuse: not client-selectable; tickets arrive by rule or by staff moving them.
• Internal: staff-only, used for work that must not be visible to a client.

Start with fewer than you think you need. A department that nobody is a member of is a queue nobody is told about.