Email Accounts vs Email Groups: what each one is for

New VICIdial operators trip over this distinction constantly. There are Email Accounts and there are Email Groups, the names sound alike, and they live in different parts of Admin. They are two separate things that work together, and knowing which is which makes inbound email setup far less confusing.

The short version: an Email Account is the mailbox VICIdial reaches out and reads. An Email Group is the queue that takes a fetched message and decides which Agent handles it. One feeds the other.

Email Account: the mailbox

An Email Account is set up under Admin and represents a real external inbox, like a support@ address at your provider. It holds the login details VICIdial needs to connect and pull mail: the protocol, the server, the username, the password, and how often to check. The account type for receiving mail should be set to INBOUND, since that is the side that loads new messages into the dialer. Each account also names the In-Group it should send messages to, which is the link that ties an account to a group.

Think of the account as the part that talks to the outside world. Without one, VICIdial has nowhere to fetch email from, and your queues sit empty no matter how well configured they are.

Email Group: the queue

An Email Group, also called an email in-group, is the queue side. It does not log into any mailbox. Instead it decides what happens to a message once it has been fetched: which available Agent receives it, how the work is ranked, which Campaign lets agents log in, and what a finished Disposition does to the Lead. A message that arrives on a group locks to the agent's screen the same way an inbound call does, so the routing rules on the group really matter.

How they connect

The two meet at the In-Group ID field on the account. The account fetches mail, hands each message to the group named in its In-Group ID, and the group routes it to a person. From the group's side, the modification page even lists the email accounts that direct mail to it, so you can see the wiring from either end.

sequenceDiagram
  participant M as "External mailbox"
  participant A as "Email Account"
  participant G as "Email Group queue"
  participant P as "Agent"
  A->>M: "Log in and check for new mail"
  M-->>A: "Return new messages"
  A->>G: "Hand message to In-Group ID"
  G->>P: "Route to next available agent"
  P-->>G: "Disposition and free up"

A useful rule of thumb: if a setting is about connecting to a mailbox, like a server name or a password, it lives on the account. If a setting is about routing to people, like ranks or which Ingroup a Closer logs into, it lives on the group. When email is not arriving, that split tells you where to look. A connection problem is an account problem; a who-got-it problem is a group problem.

Ready to build the pieces? Start with adding the email group so the account has somewhere to point, then add the account itself. The inbound email and chat guide ties the whole flow together. If you would rather not stand up the parser and mailbox wiring yourself, our pricing page covers managed VICIdial hosting with the email pieces ready to configure.