How to point an Email Account at the right Email Group

VICIdial keeps the mailbox and the queue as two separate things. An Email Account holds the connection details for an outside inbox: the server, the login, the password, how often to check it. An Email Group is the queue your agents staff, the email equivalent of an inbound call group. The piece that joins them is one small field on the Email Account called In-Group ID.

When the system pulls a message from the mailbox, it needs to know which queue to drop it into. In-Group ID answers that. It names the Email Group that the messages will be sent to, and that group is what your Agent logs into to receive them. Without this link, an account can read a mailbox but the mail has nowhere to go.

The order that matters

Because the account points at the group, the group has to exist first. Build the Email Group, give it an ID and a name, then create the Email Account and set its In-Group ID to that group's ID. If you do it the other way around, there is nothing for the account to point at.

flowchart LR
  A["Create Email Group"] --> B["Email Group ID"]
  C["Create Email Account"] --> D["Set In-Group ID to that group"]
  B --> D
  D --> E["Mailbox messages flow into the group"]
  E --> F["Assign group to a campaign"]
  F --> G["Agent staffs the group, gets email"]

A common pattern is to name the account and the group the same thing, so it is obvious which mailbox feeds which queue. That is a convention, not a rule, but it saves confusion when you run several mailboxes.

After the link is made

Pointing the account at the group is not the last step. The group still has to be made available to a Campaign before agents can pick it up. You enable the group in the campaign's allowed inbound groups, and then agents logged into that campaign can staff the queue and receive email. So the chain runs mailbox to account to group to campaign to agent, with In-Group ID joining the account to the group in the middle.

One mailbox feeding one group keeps things tidy, but you can point several accounts at the same group if you want different inboxes feeding one shared queue. Each account still carries its own connection details and its own In-Group ID; they simply share a destination. That is handy when, say, a sales address and a quotes address should both reach the same team and roll up to the same Disposition reporting.

If you have not built the group yet, start with adding a VICIdial email group. For the whole picture of how mailboxes, groups, and queues fit together, see the inbound email and chat guide. The same group can route to any Agent you staff on it, so this one field decides where a whole mailbox's traffic ends up. If you would rather not manage accounts and groups by hand, our managed hosting plans come configured and ready.