How to let a user configure Email Accounts

After email is switched on system-wide, the next snag people hit is that the person setting it up cannot see the Email Accounts screen. That is on purpose. Configuring the inbox VICIdial pulls from is a privileged action, gated behind a single permission on the user record. Grant it to the right person and the screen appears; skip it and they will keep wondering where the option went.

The permission to enable

Open the user you want to give access to, on the User modifications page. Scroll to the section labelled Admin Interface Options. Inside it you will find Modify Email Accounts. Set it so the user is allowed, and save. That is the whole change.

With it enabled, that user can open Email Accounts on the Admin tab and create or edit the account that connects VICIdial to a mailbox. Without it, the screen stays out of reach even if email is on at the system level. The permission is per-user, so you control exactly who can touch this part of the configuration.

Who should get it

Keep this narrow. An email account holds the mailbox connection details, so it is a sensitive screen. Give the permission to whoever owns the setup, usually a manager or admin, and leave it off for ordinary agents. A regular Agent never needs to edit the account to handle email; they just log into a Campaign that has an email group attached and start working messages.

• Grant it to the person building the email account and the email group.
• Leave it off for agents who only need to answer email, not configure it.
• Revisit it if responsibilities change, since it is easy to forget who has it.

Where this sits in the order of setup

This permission is the bridge between the global switch and the real configuration work. The flow is short:

flowchart TD
  A["Email allowed system-wide"] --> B["Open the user record"]
  B --> C["Admin Interface Options"]
  C --> D{"Modify Email Accounts"}
  D -->|allowed| E["User can open Email Accounts"]
  D -->|not allowed| F["Email Accounts screen hidden"]
  E --> G["Build the email account and group"]

Once the right user has the permission, they can create the email account that ties to a mailbox, then build an email group, then attach that group to a campaign. Each incoming message becomes a Lead on an agent's screen, gets locked while they reply, and is closed with a Disposition like any other contact.

With access granted, the next step is usually building the account and then attaching the group to a campaign so agents can staff it, which is covered in assigning an email group to a campaign. For the end-to-end picture, see the inbound email and chat guide. And if you would rather not manage user permissions and mailbox wiring at all, our pricing page covers the managed plans.