What the "E" keepalive and inbound email parser do

Turning on email in System Settings makes the feature available, but two server-side pieces are what actually move messages: an "E" keepalive and the inbound email parser. They are quiet background workers, so when email is configured correctly in the web admin but nothing ever reaches an agent, these two are usually where the problem is.

The "E" keepalive

VICIdial runs a set of background processes that keep the dialer alive and doing its job. The "E" entry adds email servicing to that set. You add it to the keepalive configuration of one server, and only one. It belongs in the server config file rather than the web admin, so it is a sysadmin task, not something a manager flips on a screen.

The "only one server" rule matters. If you have more than one box, you do not add the "E" to all of them. Email is handled centrally by a single server so two boxes do not fight over the same inbox or hand the same message to two agents. If you are curious about what a Keepalive is in general, it is the watchdog layer that restarts and supervises VICIdial's moving parts.

The inbound email parser

The parser is the script that does the actual work of reading new email out of your configured mailbox, matching it to a record, and queueing it for an agent. It is scheduled to run once a minute, and like the keepalive it goes on one server only, the same one. Every minute it checks the accounts that are active, pulls anything new, and turns each message into a piece of work that the routing layer can hand to someone.

When a message comes in, the parser ties it to a Lead so the agent sees the customer's record, not just a bare email. From the agent's point of view it then behaves like a call: the record pulls onto their screen, gets locked so they are not interrupted, and waits for a reply.

How the two work together

The keepalive keeps the email machinery running, and the parser is the scheduled job that feeds it. The flow from mailbox to agent looks like this:

sequenceDiagram
  participant M as "Mailbox"
  participant P as "Inbound email parser"
  participant D as "VICIdial dialer"
  participant A as "Agent"
  P->>M: "Check for new mail every minute"
  M-->>P: "New message"
  P->>D: "Match to lead and queue"
  D->>A: "Pull record onto screen and lock"
  A-->>D: "Reply and disposition"
  D-->>A: "Agent available again"

Because the parser runs every minute, expect a short delay between an email arriving in the mailbox and it showing up for an Agent. That cadence is fine for almost every team. If messages never appear at all, the usual suspects are the keepalive missing from the one server, the parser not scheduled, or the required Perl modules not installed on that box.

Once these two pieces are in place, the rest is routing inside the web admin: which email group a message lands in and which Campaign an agent is logged into to staff it. To see how the email group decides who gets each message, read how Next Agent Email routing works. For the whole picture from System Settings through to a working channel, start with the inbound email and chat guide. If wiring keepalives and cron jobs by hand is not how you want to spend your week, our pricing page shows the managed options where this is set up for you.