Bring your support mailbox into Supportbench: email forwarding, routing and first-message checks

An email route brings messages from an address your customers already know into Supportbench, where your team can manage them as cases with ownership, customer context and service commitments. For a B2B team, this connects conversations from different people at the same customer organization to an operational workflow instead of leaving the work scattered across a shared inbox. Setup has two parts: create the receiving route in Supportbench, then configure your email provider to forward the intended mail to that route.

Understand the addresses before you start  ·  Prepare the mailbox and operating rules  ·  Create and verify the Supportbench route  ·  Forward a Microsoft 365 support mailbox  ·  Forward a Gmail mailbox and complete verification  ·  Run a complete first-conversation test  ·  Find the failing step when email does not behave as expected

Understand the addresses before you start

Forwarding is an incoming-mail connection. It does not import the entire historical inbox, configure every outgoing identity, or prove that a new case reaches the right agent. Your acceptance check must include both the new message and a reply. Plan how the team will handle messages still sitting in the original mailbox during the transition.

Prepare the mailbox and operating rules

1. Confirm you have Administer email routes permission in Supportbench and that an authorized mailbox administrator can change forwarding at your provider. If Settings is read-only, ask the administrator to make the change.
2. Identify the exact mailbox and messages to forward. Avoid forwarding an employee’s entire personal work mailbox just to capture support requests.
3. Choose the division, starting priority and queue, and confirm that someone monitors that queue. A route can receive mail successfully while work waits unowned operationally.
4. Decide how new senders should become contacts and whether original senders in forwarded messages should be used. Check the resulting contact on a real test; a forwarded message’s visible From text and its actual sender context can differ.
5. Ask IT to review spam protection, external-forwarding policy and loop prevention. Do not assume forwarding alone filters unwanted mail.
6. Agree who will monitor both systems during cutover, when agents should start replying from Supportbench, and how to reverse the provider change if the test fails.

Create and verify the Supportbench route

1. Open Settings → Email configuration → Routes (inbound email) and select New Route.
2. Under Route details, enter a recognizable Name, such as Equipment support mailbox. Add a description explaining the intended channel and set Active route as required. An inactive route stops processing forwarded mail.
3. Under Case defaults, choose the Division, Priority and Queue. Select Email forms only when you deliberately use a configured form to parse structured email into case fields.
4. Under Matching rules, review Match by message references and Match by subject. References use conversation headers; subject matching is a separate option. Do not change these merely to hide duplicate cases without understanding the messages involved.
5. Under Contact handling, review Create missing contacts and Use forwarded sender as contact. Choose values consistent with your customer data policy, then test the outcome with a known contact and an approved new sender.
6. Save the route. Reopen it and copy the generated Forwarding address using its copy control. The destination appears after saving and is not a manually editable mailbox name.
7. Give that exact destination to the mailbox administrator. Keep the original mailbox address, route name and chosen queue together in your operational change record.

The Audit information helps identify when the route configuration changed. It does not replace a delivery test. For every field and dependency, use the Email routes configuration reference.

Forward a Microsoft 365 support mailbox

Choose the procedure for the mailbox type. A shared mailbox and a licensed user mailbox have different administration screens. Your Exchange administrator should also check the organization’s policy for forwarding to external destinations.

1. Shared mailbox: in the Microsoft 365 admin center, open Teams & groups → Shared mailboxes. Select your support mailbox, edit its Email forwarding setting, enable forwarding, enter the Supportbench route destination and save.
2. User mailbox: open Users → Active users, choose the mailbox user and its Mail tab, then manage forwarding. Enable it, enter the route destination, decide whether to retain a mailbox copy and save.
3. Send a new external test message. If delivery fails, have IT check the forwarding policy and mail trace before repeatedly changing the Supportbench route.

Microsoft states that user-mailbox forwarding requires the applicable license and only forwards new mail. Shared-mailbox forwarding follows its separate requirements. Check Microsoft’s current user-mailbox forwarding instructions and shared-mailbox forwarding instructions for your environment. Provider instructions checked on 28 October 2026.

Forward a Gmail mailbox and complete verification

1. On a computer, sign in to the Gmail mailbox that should receive support requests. Open Settings → See all settings, then Forwarding and POP/IMAP or the available forwarding tab.
2. Add the copied Supportbench destination and confirm the prompts. Gmail sends a verification message to that destination.
3. Locate the verification message through the receiving route, with the authorized Supportbench administrator if necessary. Confirm that it belongs to the forwarding setup you just initiated before following its verification link.
4. Return to Gmail settings and refresh. Select the verified destination for forwarding incoming mail, choose how Gmail should retain its copy, and save.
5. If you only want a subset of messages, configure an appropriate Gmail filter instead of forwarding the entire mailbox. Test both an included message and one that should remain excluded.

Gmail forwards new messages after setup and excludes mail it identifies as spam. Adding the address alone is not the completed configuration. Follow Google’s current forwarding instructions if your screen differs. Provider instructions checked on 28 October 2026.

Run a complete first-conversation test

1. Send a new message from an approved external test contact to your ordinary support mailbox. Use a unique subject so you can find it without exposing customer information.
2. Confirm the message reaches Supportbench and inspect the resulting case’s contact, company association, division, priority, queue and content. Check any intended attachment.
3. Review final assignment after applicable workflows. A route default is the starting point, not a promise that no later rule changes it.
4. Reply from the case using the intended reply address. Confirm the external test recipient receives the right sender identity, readable content and signature.
5. Reply back from that mailbox without manually reconstructing the message. Verify the response joins the intended case and that the receiving team notices the update.
6. Repeat for a second supported customer contact, and for a new sender if contact creation is enabled. Record the observed results before announcing the cutover to agents.

Find the failing step when email does not behave as expected

When escalating a delivery issue, provide the route name, approximate send time with timezone, sanitized subject, expected destination and whether the original mailbox received the message. Include the relevant case ID if one exists. Avoid sharing mailbox passwords or authentication tokens.

Continue learning

• Configure every email-route setting
• Configure reply addresses and signatures
• Choose the right message-branding editor
• Route activity keywords with precise conditions
• Understand workflow processing
• Create and verify a case