As we've continued to indicate in the past, we're constantly working both over-the-hood and under-the-hood to improve your experience while using Zoho Support. Today, we're introducing an under-the-hood improvement.
Our underlying mail infrastructure was based on POP and SMTP technology. POP is used to fetch emails from your mail server and SMTP is used to send outgoing emails from Zoho Support. Although POP is time-tested technology, we've realized that it's just not good enough for customer service anymore.
So, we've overhauled our mail fetching infrastructure to be based on a technology called
Email Forwarding. Instead of Zoho Support constantly asking your mail server if there is any new email, your email server can be instructed to automatically forward incoming emails to Zoho Support. Simply put, that's Email Forwarding.
Email Forwarding brings
two important
advantages to the table.
- It's much faster and much more efficient. Your email server knows when there's new email. So, it can forward new email messages as soon as they arrive. There's very little delay in the process.
- It doesn't get affected by things such as your company's password policy. For data security, a lot of companies now have a policy of changing email passwords at regular intervals. We have that here at Zoho as well. When you setup a forwarding rule on your email server, it works fine irrespective of what your password is.
This works straight-out-of-the-box for new customers. So if you're just starting with us, you can learn more about it
here.
Existing customers have to go through a simple 3-step process.
- Create a Zoho Support email address (a mail alias). This is the email address to which your email server forwards new emails.
- Create a forwarding rule on your email server. This will tell your server to forward new incoming emails to your Zoho Support email address.
- Authenticate the forwarding rule. Your email server will send an email to Zoho Support to confirm the forwarding rule. Click on the link in the email and that's it.
Until you complete these three steps, you'll continue to receive emails via POP. So, there won't be any disruption in your incoming email delivery. You don't need to worry about that at all!
If you've
setup any automations (workflows, time-based rules etc.) using your own support email addresses, you'll have to use your newly-created Zoho Support email addresses (mail aliases) in the rules. These changes have to be made manually.