Welcome to the second guide in the Screen-by-Screen Series! If you’re not familiar with this series, you can find an introduction to it in our first walkthrough, Screen-by-Screen #1: Helpdesk Setup -> Mail Setup

Scheduler

To get to the scheduler, click ‘helpdesk setup’ then the ‘Scheduler’ tab.

The Scheduler is what actually runs when you run the cron task. You can configure different items on the scheduler page, and you can also get the instructions on running the cronjob there as well. You can find more information configuring a cronjob to run the scheduler in our Wiki article on Automating mail parsing for the future.

Scheduled Jobs

You can see a list of scheduled jobs and some information on them as well. By clicking on each job, you can configure that job.

POP3 / IMAP E-Mail Importing

The POP3 / IMAP E-Mail Importing task is one of the most important tasks. It downloads the email from each of the mail servers you have setup (for more information, see the previous guide in this series: Screen-by-Screen #1: Helpdesk Setup -> Mail Setup or see our Wiki article on Downloading real mail into your helpdesk).

• Enabled: As long as this box is checked, this task will run. If you want to stop your helpdesk from downloading mail, you can uncheck this box.
• Run every: This task will run at the specified interval, in hours, minutes, or days.
• Starting at date: This task will only run after the specified date.
• Max messages to download per mailbox check: This is the number of messages that will be downloaded per mailbox each time this task runs.

Inbound E-Mail Processing

The Inbound E-Mail Processing task is the other most important task. When it runs, it runs the Mail Filtering and Mail Routing rules against the messages that were downloaded in the previous task, parsing them into tickets. This task also scans for raw email messages in the /storage/mail/new directory as well (for more information on importing raw email messages, see our Wiki article on Getting tickets via mail pipe). The settings are identical to the above task, except for one.

• Max messages to parse per run: This is the maximum number of messages the task will parse when it runs.

Heartbeat

The heartbeat task can be used by plugins to run custom, programmatically defined tasks. For more information, see our developer docs.

Maintenance

The maintenance task cleans up the database and the filesystem.

• Purge deleted tickets from database after: This setting controls how long tickets will remain inactive for before the maintenance task deletes them from the database. You can find more information in our wiki article on Deleted Tickets.

Background Importing and Synchronization

The Background Importing and Synchronization task is used when you want to import from the /storage/import/new directory. It is mainly used when you are importing data from another source. If you aren’t importing something, it is safe to disable this task.

Stay tuned for Screen-by-Screen #3!