What the Email Group ID and Group Name do

Every VICIdial Email Group needs three fields before you can save it: an ID, a Name, and a Color. Two of those — the Group ID and the Group Name — are the identity of the group. They look similar but they do very different jobs, and one of them can never be changed. Here is what each one is for.

Group ID — the permanent short name

The Group ID is the short internal handle for the inbound group. It has to be between 2 and 20 characters with no spaces. It also has to be unique across the whole system — it cannot match any existing in-group or campaign ID. Think of it like a primary key: short, no spaces, one of a kind.

Because it shares the same namespace as your Ingroup and campaign IDs, a clash will be rejected at save time. Pick something that reads cleanly in reports, like sales-email or support, so it is easy to spot next to your voice queues.

Group Name — the human-readable label

The Group Name is the full, human-friendly name of the email account. It can be 2 to 30 characters, which gives you more room than the ID. Unlike the ID, the Name is editable on the Modify screen at any time. This is the label a manager reads, so make it descriptive — "Sales Inbound Mailbox" instead of a cryptic code.

How the two compare

Side by side, the difference is about permanence and length.

flowchart TD
  A["New Email Group"] --> B["Group ID"]
  A --> C["Group Name"]
  B --> D["2-20 chars, no spaces"]
  B --> E["Unique vs ingroups, campaigns"]
  B --> F["Locked after first save"]
  C --> G["2-30 chars"]
  C --> H["Editable anytime"]
  C --> I["Shown to managers"]

In short: the ID is the rigid, unique, permanent key the system routes on; the Name is the flexible label people read. Both are required, but only the Name forgives a mistake. The third required field, the Color, drives the alert an Agent sees when mail arrives — see what the Email Group Color does.

Naming both fields well

Because the ID and Name show up in different places, a small bit of discipline saves you trouble later:

• Keep the ID short, lowercase, and hyphenated — it has to fit 2 to 20 characters with no spaces.
• Make the Name a plain-English description a new manager would understand at a glance.
• Check the ID against your existing queues before saving — a clash with an in-group or campaign ID is rejected.

If two of your mailboxes serve the same team, give them IDs that sort together — sales-us and sales-eu, for instance — so they sit side by side in reports and the agent app.

Why this matters at scale

Because the ID is permanent and shares a namespace with your other queues, a thoughtful naming scheme pays off as you grow. When an arriving message pulls up the matching Lead and the agent later applies a Disposition, the Group ID is what ties that work back to the right inbound stream in your reports. A messy ID makes that history hard to read for years.

That is the whole story on the two identity fields. Once they are set, the next steps are tuning the Active flag and the Web Form buttons — see what the Web Form buttons do. For the full inbound picture, read the VICIdial inbound email and chat guide. And if you would rather not manage the server side at all, see our managed VICIdial pricing.