How to copy a VICIdial Email Group instead of rebuilding it

Building an email group in VICIdial takes a fair number of clicks. There are routing methods, status overrides, web form addresses, QC settings, and ranks to set. If you already have a group dialed in the way you like and want a second one almost like it, you do not have to redo all of that by hand. VICIdial has a Copy Email Group page that clones an existing group's settings into a brand new in-group.

This saves time, and it also keeps your groups consistent. When two queues share the same routing rules and the same handling of a finished Disposition, your agents behave the same way no matter which group an email landed in. That consistency is worth more than it sounds once you have a handful of teams.

What the copy actually does

The page asks for three things, and only three. You enter a new Email Group ID, a new Email Group name, and you pick the source group you want to copy from. VICIdial then creates a new in-group and pulls every other setting across from the source. You are not copying the emails or any history, just the configuration: the way the group routes work to an Agent, how it ties to a Campaign, and the rest of the fields.

• New Email Group ID: the short identifier for the new group. Pick something unused and clear.
• New Email Group name: the human-readable label managers and agents will see.
• Source Email Group: the existing group whose settings you want to copy.

The copy flow

The mechanism is simple. You give the new group an identity, point at a source, and VICIdial stamps the source's settings onto the new in-group for you.

flowchart TD
  A["Open Copy Email Group"] --> B["Enter new Group ID"]
  B --> C["Enter new Group name"]
  C --> D["Pick source Email Group"]
  D --> E["Submit"]
  E --> F["New in-group created"]
  F --> G["Settings copied from source"]
  G --> H["Review and adjust as needed"]

After the copy, open the new group and review it. The ID and name are yours, but everything else came from the source, so check the fields that should differ between the two queues. The most common ones to revisit are the web form address, any status override that moves a finished email into a different list, and the rank or grade of each Agent who works the new group. If the new queue serves a different team or a different mailbox, those are the settings most likely to be wrong by default.

Copying is the right move whenever you want a near-duplicate: a second-language queue, an overflow group, a test group you can break without touching production, or a per-region split where routing stays the same but the team changes. It is the wrong move if the two groups share almost nothing, because then you are just deleting copied settings, and building fresh is cleaner.

If you have not built your first group yet, start with adding an email group, then come back here to clone it. For how email queues fit alongside calls and chats, the inbound email and chat guide covers the whole picture. The same group settings drive how an Ingroup hands work to a Closer, so copying keeps that behavior identical across queues. If you would rather skip the parser setup and email plumbing entirely, our pricing page lays out managed VICIdial plans where the box is ready to go.