Department Mailboxes

Most companies don't have one support address — they have several. hr@, finance@,

staff already expect, while every email still becomes a ticket in QueueDesk.

Mail sent to your HR address arrives already assigned to your HR group, and replies about it

go back out from your HR address. Nobody outside HR has to see it, and nobody writing in

has to learn a new address.

Your workspace already comes with IT Support, HR, Finance and Facilities

groups, so in most cases setting a department up is a matter of switching its mail on — not

creating anything from scratch.

Optional, but worth doing: set up Settings → Email → Sender identity so replies can

go out from your own department addresses. Routing works without it — mail still lands in

the right group — but replies come from your workspace's usual address until your domain is

verified for sending.

1. How it works

Each department mailbox gets its own QueueDesk address, which is your normal workspace address

with a tag on the end:

Your bare workspace address ({slug}@mail.queuedesk.com) keeps working as it always has —

anything sent there goes to the general queue and is classified by AI as usual.

2. Setting one up

1. Go to Settings → Groups and open the group that should own the mail — say HR. If

the department doesn't exist yet, create the group first with New group.

2. Click Enable department mail. QueueDesk works out the address from the group's name,

so HR becomes {slug}+hr@mail.queuedesk.com, and shows you the result.

3. Copy that address and add a forward rule for it in your own mail system, exactly as you did

for your main support address.

That's the whole setup. From then on, mail to that address opens tickets owned by the group,

and any agent you add to the group picks them up.

While you're on the group, three things are worth doing at the same time:

• •Add its members, so the right people are working the queue.

• •Turn on group-based visibility if this mail is confidential — see the next section.

• •Show it on the employee portal, so staff who use the portal instead of email can send requests to this department too — see Departments on the Employee Portal.

Each mailbox shows a warning until the first email actually arrives. The forward rule lives in

your mail system, where QueueDesk can't see it, so that warning is the only way to tell a

misconfigured forward from a quiet week. If it doesn't clear after you've sent a test, the

forward rule is the place to look.

You can have up to 10 department mailboxes per workspace.

Finer control

Settings → Email → Forwarding holds the same mailboxes with the extra options:

• •Their address — the department address you already use, e.g. hr@yourcompany.com. Fill this in to have replies go out from it. It must be on the same domain as your sender identity, otherwise the mail would be unsigned and land in spam.

• •Raise these as — most departmental mail is a service request rather than an incident. This sets the ticket type the mail starts as. It's a starting point, not a lock: if the email clearly describes something broken, AI triage can reclassify it as an incident. On a group with no ticket prefix of its own the number follows, so REQ-1005 becomes INC-1005; on a group numbered HR-… the number doesn't change, because it already names the department rather than the type. Either way it settles before your colleague's confirmation email goes out, so the number they're given is always the final one.

• •Switching a mailbox off, or removing it.

3. Where everything else goes

Mail that arrives at no department address — your bare workspace address, the portal, chat —

goes to your catch-all group, set at the top of Settings → Groups. It starts as

IT Support and you can point it at any group, or at nothing if you'd rather triage by hand.

Department addresses, assignment rules and AI triage all take priority over it, so the

catch-all only handles what nothing else claimed.

4. Restricting who can see what

Department mailboxes set the group on the ticket. On their own that organises your queue; whether

it also hides anything depends on group-based visibility, in Settings → Groups.

With it on, agents see only tickets belonging to their groups, plus anything assigned to them

personally or that they raised themselves — so HR tickets are visible only to HR. With it off,

every agent can still see every ticket. Workspaces created from 9 September 2026 have it on

already; older ones have it off until you turn it on. Admins and owners always see everything

either way.

The two features are designed to be used together: routing puts the ticket in the right group

the moment it arrives — before anything else looks at it — so there's no window where an HR

complaint sits in the general queue.

5. Replies

Once a ticket belongs to a department mailbox, everything QueueDesk sends about it uses that

department's identity:

• •From — the department address, e.g. HR <hr@yourcompany.com>.

• •Reply-To — the department's QueueDesk address, so replies come back to us and thread onto the same ticket, still routed to the same group.

This applies to confirmations, agent replies, resolution notices, satisfaction surveys,

approval requests and AI-drafted answers alike. Agents don't have to think about it or pick a

"send as" address — it follows the ticket.

When your mail system wraps a message with the department address as its sender, QueueDesk uses

one clear Reply-To or forwarded From header to identify the original requester. If several

addresses could be the requester, the ticket asks an agent to confirm the email before replying

instead of guessing.

If you later move your sender identity to a different domain, department addresses on the old

domain stop being used and replies fall back to your main support address. QueueDesk tells you

which mailboxes are affected at the moment you make the change, so you can update them.

6. Common questions

Do I have to change the address my staff email?

No. They keep emailing hr@yourcompany.com. The forward rule is invisible to them.

What if someone emails the wrong department?

It becomes a ticket in that department's group, and an agent can move it like any other

ticket. Nothing is lost.

Can I change a mailbox's QueueDesk address later?

No — the tag is fixed once created, because your forward rule depends on it. Delete the

mailbox and add a new one if you need a different tag. Renaming the group is fine and

changes nothing about the address.

Do I have to use the four groups you set up?

No. Rename them, deactivate the ones you don't need, or add your own — a group you create

behaves exactly like the ones that came with your workspace. If you rename the group your

catch-all points at, it stays your catch-all.

Will HR tickets be numbered HR-1005?

They can be. Give the HR group a ticket prefix on its card in Settings → Groups, and

every ticket HR owns is numbered HR-… — mail to its address, requests from the portal, and

anything QueAssist routes to it alike. Leave the prefix blank, as it is by default, and an HR

request is numbered by type as before (REQ-1005), with the Group field showing who owns

it. Either way, don't use the prefix under Settings → Ticket numbering for this: that one

applies to every ticket in the workspace. See

Departments on the Employee Portal for the trade-offs.

Does every group need its own address?

No. Plenty of workspaces run on one address and let AI triage sort tickets into groups. Turn

department mail on only for the departments whose mail should never be misfiled.

What happens to existing tickets if I remove a mailbox?

They keep their history and keep replying from the same address, so open conversations aren't

disrupted mid-thread. Only new mail stops being routed.

Can I use assignment rules with these?

Yes. A mailbox is available as a condition in Settings → Assignment rules, so you can add

extra behaviour — for example, mail to the Finance mailbox mentioning "payroll" gets high

priority. You don't need a rule just to set the group; the mailbox already does that.

What does QueAssist reply to mail sent to a department address?

Only what that department's own Knowledge Base articles say — quoting the article it used — or

nothing at all, leaving the request for a person. Generic IT troubleshooting steps are never sent

to a non-IT department's requesters. See

How QueAssist Answers Each Department.