Use YouTrack as a Help Desk

Click the Projects link in the header, then click the Create Project button.

Enter a name (Help Desk), and a description for the project.

Select the project type that you want to use. Any type will work just fine, but if you select a Kanban project, YouTrack automatically creates an agile board that your support engineers can use to manage issues. This project type also uses fewer default custom fields, which makes it easier to configure for your help desk.

Click the Create project button.

• The project overview for the new project opens.

In the Administration section of the sidebar, click the Settings link.

• The Edit Project page opens.

Set the manager of the help desk as the Project owner and click the Apply changes button.

Select the Notifications tab and set the from address or sender name for email messages in the project.

• If your YouTrack installation is connected to your own email service, you can customize the From address. Enter the email address that you want to use to send notifications for the help desk project.

• If you're working with a YouTrack Cloud instance that uses the default configuration for email notifications, you can only customize the Sender name.

If your from address doesn't process replies, enter the email address that you want to use as the Reply-To address.

Click the Apply changes button.

Select the Fields tab and configure the custom fields in the new project:

• Add your support engineers to the list of assignees.

• Configure the custom fields that you want to use in the project. For a help desk, you can get by with Type, Priority, Assignee, and State. The project administrator can add more custom fields as needed.

• Remove any unrelated default custom fields.

Select the Workflow tab.

Detach any unrelated workflows. For example, if you used the Kanban project template, you can detach the Kanban workflow. It's more appropriate for development teams, not support engineers.

Click the Attach workflows button and select Notify Multiple Unregistered Users from the drop-down list.

• The workflow is attached to the project.

• The requires setup flag indicates that the workflow uses custom fields that are not used in the project.

Add the missing fields and field values to the project:

• Expand the workflow and select the first workflow rule.

• Click a Configure project button to add the required field to the project.

• Click the Apply button to create the custom field if it didn't exist before and attach it to your project.

• Repeat the process for the second required custom field.

The following custom fields are added to the project:

When finished, check the list of custom fields in the project to verify that all of the required fields are in place.

From the Administration menu, select Mailbox Integration.

Set the Fetching interval. For details, see Set the Schedule for Fetching Email Messages.

Connect to the mail service that you use to receive email messages. For details, see Connect to a Mail Service.

Click the Add Mailbox Rule button and configure the following settings:

Click to expand the Filter section and enter values for the following settings:

Click to expand the Reporter section.

Select the Always set predefined user as reporter option and select the predefined user to set as the reporter for all issues that are created from incoming email messages. This option guarantees that YouTrack does not create a user account for each new customer who sends a support request.

Click to expand the Postprocessing section.

In the Command on New Issues input field, enter the following command:

This command stores all of the email addresses that are included in processed email messages. When an issue is updated, the workflow processes this data, updates the All related emails field, sends notifications, and clears this field. For this reason, you will probably never see any values in the Last message related emails field.

Copy the same command to the Command on New Comment field.

Click the Add Rule button.