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Known issues

This section describes the most common problems that customers report and how they can be resolved:

Help Desk has suddenly stopped fetching emails​

There are several possible reasons why the fetch stopped:

IMAP fetch capacity limit

The IMAP protocol has a limited time window for fetching an email collection. When your mailbox contains over 2048 emails, the fetching process becomes too long, and IMAP returns an empty collection. Our extension, therefore, thinks that there are no new emails and exits.

  • How to confirm this reason: Go to Customers -> Help Desk MX -> Gateways, select the proper gateway, and press the Debug button on its edit page. It will display the current number of emails. If it is above 2048, this confirms the reason.

  • How to resolve:

    • Remove all unnecessary emails: this will reduce the fetched collection size, and the fetch process will work properly.
    • Create a folder or label in a mailbox, and force a fetch from there: please enter the name of the created folder or label in the Folder field of the Gateway. This will force our extension to fetch emails only from there, reducing the fetched collection size.

 

Incorrect email format

Some emails may come in a special format, such as non-standard encoding (e.g., Chinese Unicode) or from a non-standard origin (e.g., Telnet). Not all of them can be parsed, as they are not standard. These emails can block subsequent email fetches because a parsing error stops the fetching cron task.

  • How to confirm this reason: Go to Customers -> Help Desk MX -> Gateways, select the proper gateway, and press the Debug button on the edit page. It will display the current number of emails. If it's below 2048 and one of the last emails is unread, this confirms the reason.

  • How to resolve: Log in to your mailbox separately, and mark that message as read. Our extension will skip it and proceed with the others. Note: There may be other incorrect emails, so you might need to forcefully read several such emails.

 

Third-party tool or extension conflict

Our extension requires exclusive access to the mailbox registered as a gateway. It fetches unread emails and marks them as read, so they will not be fetched again. If you use a third-party tool that also accesses the same mailbox, it may mark emails as read, causing our extension to skip them.

  • How to confirm this reason: Go to Customers -> Help Desk MX -> Gateways, select the proper gateway, and press the Debug button on the edit page. It will display the current number of emails. If it's below 2048, and the last emails are marked as read but are not converted into tickets or messages, this confirms the reason.

  • How to resolve: Prevent your third-party extension from marking emails as read, or stop using it entirely.

note

There is a rare case when two different stores on different servers (both with Help Desk installed) use the same database. In this case, emails will only be fetched by one store, and the Help Desk on the other will skip all emails.

To resolve this, create two different Gateways for each store.

Latest fetch was incomplete due to an issue with the server

Emails may not be fetched because the latest fetch was incomplete due to an issue with the server (e.g., an upgrade process) and the fetch process became locked. To check if fetching works, you can run the following command to fetch emails manually:

bin/magento mirasvit:helpdesk:run

If the process is locked, you should delete the helpdesk.lock file and fetch emails again. The file is created with each cron run, so the file is always on the server. You should only remove it if there is an issue with fetching.

When I save a gateway, I see the error message 'Authentication failed for user...'​

This error indicates that the extension could not connect to the mailbox. Possible causes include:

  1. You use two-factor authentication in your mailbox

    In this case, you need to create an app password for the Help Desk and use it when you configure the gateway.

  2. IMAP is disabled for your mailbox

    Please contact your mailbox provider and ask them to enable IMAP.

IMAP has limited support or is completely disabled at the shell level​

This issue is reported by our Email Fetching module and can be seen in Customers -> Help Desk MX -> Gateways, where the error "Can't fetch" appears. You can also run the following test: Open your shell console and run this command:

php -m | grep imap

If you see an empty result, then IMAP is not enabled, and you need to enable it.

The cause of this issue is that PHP has two configurations: one for Apache (or other servers), and another for shell, where the php-imap extension should work. Our extension fetches emails at the shell level (via cron tasks) to use only php shell.

Solution:

Contact your hosting provider and ask them to enable php-imap for PHP at the shell level.

Email replies do not bind to their tickets and are fetched as new tickets.​

Possible causes:

  1. The variable {{var ticket.getHiddenCodeHtml()}} is missing in the email template

    This issue occurs when the special variable {{var ticket.getHiddenCodeHtml()}} is missing from the email template. It can also be caused by filters or spam protection measures from your email provider.

    Solution 1:

    • Go to Store > Configuration -> Help Desk MX -> Email Notification Settings and check the name of the template used.
    • If a custom template is selected, go to System -> Transaction Emails and edit that template. Add the variable {{var ticket.getHiddenCodeHtml()}} in the appropriate place and save.
    • If the standard template is selected, check the templates in the app/locale/[YOUR_LOCALE]/template/email/mst_helpdesk/ directory. Restore the {{var ticket.getHiddenCodeHtml()}} variable to the appropriate template and save.
    • Purge all caches.

    Solution 2:

    • Go to Store > Configuration > Help Desk MX -> Email Notification Settings and set the Show Ticket ID in the email title option to Yes.

  2. The email service removes hidden ticket codes

    This issue occurs when the email service (e.g., Office360) strips all additional email attributes, including the ticket code. As a result, the customer's response cannot be bound to the correct ticket.

    Solution:

    • Go to Store -> Configuration -> Help Desk MX -> Email Notification Settings and set the option Show Ticket ID in the email title to Yes.

When staff replies via email, messages do not appear in tickets.​

Please check your sender emails. If staff replies from emails that are also registered as gateways, these replies are skipped because our extension treats them as auto-notifications.

Moreover, all emails that come from gateway mailboxes are skipped to avoid an infinite loop of "conversations" between gateways.

Solution:

Remove all mailboxes used as sender emails from gateways, or provide your staff with separate mailboxes.