Overview
Attachments in tickets
Sending and receiving attachments are central to the communication between the Kayako Classic (KC) staff and the clients.
Attachments can be added directly to the conversations through KC's interface while creating or replying to the tickets. Users can do that from the Support Center (clients) and the Staff CP (agents).
Email is another way of creating tickets and replying to tickets. When KC retrieves an email from an email queue, it will process its content and either create a new ticket or add to the conversation of an existing ticket. KC's email parser will analyze any attachments in the email and the files will be either attached to the ticket or discarded, according to the defined rules and settings.
Attachments flow.
The overall size of messages and attachments supported both from email and KC's interface depends on settings in the helpdesk and PHP parameters as well.
When Kayako attempts to process a message, and it exceeds the size limit, it will remain in the queue unless deleted from the mailbox and will be checked every time the cron/scheduled task is executed. It is advised to delete larger-sized emails as they may block other emails from being processed by the email parser. By default, no notification is sent to the user stating that the attachment is too large. However, that can be achieved by setting up an email parser rule.
KC allows for fine-tuning individual file types and sizes that can be uploaded and attached to tickets. That way, customers can build a whitelist/blacklist of permitted attachments. The file type list is managed from the Admin CP >> Tickets >> File Types option:
File types configurations.
The email parser rules will consider the above configurations when the parameter "Use file attachment type whitelist" is set to "Yes" under the "EMAIL PARSER SETTINGS" section in Admin CP >> Tickets >> Settings.
The helpdesk attachments can be found in the KC's root directory, under the __swift/files/
directory. They are referenced from the swattachments
table.
Attachments in the ticket.
Attachments in the database.
Attachments in the file system.
The default location for storing attachments - file system or database - can be changed (Admin CP >> Settings >> Server setting and performance >> Storage location for file attachments):
Storage location for file attachments.
As the overall size of the stored attachments can grow considerably big over time, some maintenance options are available to help manage them. Customers can move attachments between the file system and the database (Admin CP >> Maintenance >> Move Attachments), as well as purge them according to specific criteria (Admin CP >> Maintenance >> Purge Attachments).
Attachments in the knowledge base
Articles in the knowledge base also can contain attachments, and they follow size limitations, just like tickets and emails.
Regarding file types, though, there are no restrictions. Any file type is allowed, and the whitelist rules are not observed.
Relationship with other topics
Topics related to Attachments.
- Email Fetch: Kayako retrieves email messages from the configured email queues. Size limits may prevent KC from processing emails as expected, most likely due to large attachments.
- Rules (Email Parser): rules defined in the email parser are also subject to email size limits, which can also be defined in the parser settings. Combined with the number of messages being processes, that can lead, for example, to missing attachments.