Before you begin
- Atlas Flow on your plan (Professional or higher) and turned on for the tenant
- An Atlas role with the Manage Atlas Flow settings permission (Atlas administrators have it)
- A support mailbox in Exchange Online (a shared mailbox works well), in the tenant Atlas manages
- The Exchange Administrator role assigned to the Atlas app in Microsoft Entra, so Atlas can set up its access to that one mailbox
- For replies to requesters: an email sender configured in Settings → Email
How email intake works
Every couple of minutes Atlas checks the support mailbox's Inbox for mail that arrived since intake was turned on, and handles each new email once:
- A new conversation opens a ticket. The subject becomes the title, the email text (without the quoted history) becomes the description, and the sender is recorded as the requester.
- A reply is added to its ticket as a public comment from the sender. Atlas recognizes a reply by its email headers, or by the ticket number in the subject, such as [ACME-1042].
- Automatic replies, out-of-office messages, bounces, newsletters and mailing-list mail are ignored, so they never open tickets or start a loop.
- Mail from the support mailbox itself, and from senders outside your allowed domains, is ignored.
Mail that was already in the mailbox when you turned intake on is left alone; Atlas starts from that moment. Email bodies are not stored in the intake log, only the sender and subject.
How Atlas gets access to the mailbox
Atlas does not ask for permission to read every mailbox in your tenant. When you turn intake on, Atlas uses Exchange Online's role-based access for applications to grant its own app read-only access (the Application Mail.Read role) limited to the one support mailbox you named, through a management scope that matches only that address. That is why the Atlas app needs the Exchange Administrator role: to create that scope and assignment. Turning intake off, or changing the mailbox, removes the access again.
Exchange can take from 30 minutes to 2 hours to honor a new grant. Until then the settings page shows Access has been granted with a note that Exchange may still be catching up. Nothing is lost: once access works, Atlas reads the mail that arrived after you turned intake on.
Step 1: Turn on email intake
In Atlas Flow, open the Settings tab and find Email intake.
- Support mailbox: the address customers write to, for example support@contoso.com.
- Allowed sender domains (optional): only senders from these domains can open or reply to tickets, separated by commas. Subdomains are included. Leave it empty to accept email from anyone.
- Priority, Category and Team: what a ticket opened from email starts with.
- Reopen a waiting or resolved ticket when someone replies: on by default. A reply to a closed ticket always opens a new ticket that links back to the old one.
- Email the requester when a technician replies or resolves the ticket: on by default (see below).
Turn on Open tickets from email and select Save. The switch stays unavailable until a support mailbox is entered.
Step 2: Check that Atlas can read the mailbox
The status line at the top of Email intake shows where access stands, with Last checked and Emails read once mail is flowing:
- Atlas can read this mailbox: everything is working.
- Access has been granted: Exchange has not caught up yet. Wait; it can take up to 2 hours.
- Atlas needs the Exchange Administrator role: assign the role to the Atlas app in Microsoft Entra, then select Retry.
- Exchange has no mailbox with this address: check the spelling of the support mailbox and save again.
- Atlas could not get read access to this mailbox: select Retry. If access worked before and stopped (for example, someone removed the assignment in Exchange), Retry grants it again.
Replies to the requester
When Email the requester is on, a requester whose ticket came in by email hears back by email. A technician's public comment is sent to them in full, and when the ticket is resolved they get a short note saying so, and that replying reopens it when that setting is on. Internal notes never leave Atlas.
- The email comes from your notification email address (Settings → Email), with Reply-To set to the support mailbox, so Atlas needs no permission to send as the support mailbox.
- The subject carries the ticket number, so the requester's reply comes back in through intake and lands on the same ticket.
- Atlas only accepts a reply by ticket number from the requester or a colleague on the same email domain, so nobody can post into a ticket by guessing its number.
Attachments
Files on an email that becomes a ticket or a reply are saved onto the ticket, under the same rules as a file a technician uploads:
- PDFs and images, up to 15 MB each, at most 10 per email. Each file's contents are checked against its type.
- A screenshot pasted into the email is saved. Small inline images such as signature logos, attached emails and calendar invites are left out.
- A file that can't be saved (another type, too large, or over the limit) is listed under Attachments not saved at the end of the ticket text, so the technician knows to ask for it.
See what became of every email
Recent email, below the settings, lists each email Atlas read: when it arrived, who sent it, the subject, and the result. Ticket opened and Added to ticket link straight to the ticket, a paperclip shows how many files were saved, and ignored mail says why (an automatic reply, sent by the support mailbox, or a sender not allowed).
You can also ask Atlas Advisor, with or without an AI provider: "Is email to ticket working?", "Which tickets came from email?" or "Why didn't the email from ann@contoso.com become a ticket?"
Turning email intake off
Turn off Open tickets from email and select Save. Atlas stops reading the mailbox and removes its read access in Exchange. Tickets already opened from email stay as they are, and the support mailbox keeps every message, since Atlas never changed it.