How to forward emails to Freshdesk correctly in Office Exchange 365

When you are setting up Freshdesk to use as a support portal for your company you will want to have something like support@yourdomain.com routed through to allow people to raise a ticket when you recieve a support query on that email address.

In Office 365 there are several options to do this. The following is what I believe to be the most straightforward.

Office 365 setup

The first step is to make a group / distribution list which will recieve the emails.

Go to Office 365 and login then if you are not already on the admin pages click the blue box top left choose admin then on the netx page choose exchange from the left menu under the Admin dropdown.

You can now click, under recipients, the option for groups.

Click the + icon and make a new group and choose distribution group

Enter Display name as something meaningful like Mycompany Support System

Enter the alias as Support (or whatever you want your support email to be)

In email address first choose the correct domain from the dropdown if you have more than one domain setup. then enter support to the left so the full address will be support@yourdomain.com

Go down to the members area below and ensure the box is ticked to Add Group Owners As Members

Add anyone else you want to recieve emails from this distribution group into the members area.

Click Save you will now see the new group appear in 365

You still need to make one more change which you can do now. Double click on the group to open it. Click on delivery management change the option to accept email from outside your organisation (otherwise noone external to your exchange setuip can email you which kind of defeats the point)

You can now test the new email address and you should recieve an email which is sent to that distribution list

Setup Outlook Rule

The second part to this process is to setupo a rule in outlook to redirect emails to this address

In outlook firstly fin that email that you just recieved sent to the distribution list (I am using 2013 yours may vary for other versions) click on Rules and Create Rule

tick the box that says Sent To Mydomain Support then click advanced options

Click Next

Tick the box next to Redirect i to people or a public group

At the bottom in the Edit The Rule box click on the People or a public group link.

This opens up a to box which you can enter your Freshdesk support email (see below if you are unsure how to get this) or if you are using any other support platform you can find the email to send new tickts to and it should be created.

Freshdesk Email Address

To find your freshdesk email address you login to the admin area of the site click on Admin and then under the support channels section at the top you can choose Emails which is currently the first option. At the top of that page you will see something along the lines of yourdomaincouksupport@yourdomain.freshdesk.com if you send an email to this address (or redirect it as above) then it will create a ticket for you along with a contact and whatever other rules you have set there.