Email

Each team in Serval can have its own email intake address (e.g., support@yourcompany.com). When someone sends an email to that address, Serval creates a ticket, threads replies into the right conversation, and can automatically respond — depending on your team’s settings and whether the sender is trusted. This guide covers how email intake works, when Serval responds, how subscribers and CC recipients are managed, and how external users are handled.

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How Email Intake Works

When someone sends an email to your team’s intake address, Serval processes it as follows:

1. The email is received and scanned for viruses.
2. Serval checks whether this is a new request or a reply to an existing ticket. It uses standard email threading headers (References, In-Reply-To) to match replies to the correct ticket.
3. If it’s a new email, a ticket is created and the sender becomes the ticket requester.
4. If it’s a reply, the message is added to the existing ticket conversation.
5. An auto-response is sent to the sender confirming the ticket was created (if enabled).

Serval intelligently threads email replies — including replies from CC’d users — back to the correct ticket. No duplicate tickets are created from replies.

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When Serval Responds

How Serval responds to an inbound email depends on two things: whether the sender is trusted and whether the email is a new request or a reply to an existing ticket.

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Sender trust

A sender is considered trusted when both of these are true:

1. Their email domain is in your team’s domain allowlist.
2. The email passes DKIM verification (proving it actually came from that domain).

If either condition fails — or if the sender’s domain is not allowlisted but your team has Allow all domains enabled — the sender is treated as untrusted.

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Response behavior by scenario

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What “AI active” means

Each ticket has an AI active flag that controls whether Serval’s AI agent processes new messages and generates responses.

• Trusted sender tickets start with AI active.
• Untrusted sender tickets start with AI inactive and escalated to a human.
• When a team member escalates a ticket, AI is deactivated.
• A team member can re-enable AI on any escalated ticket by mentioning @Serval in the conversation, or by manually toggling it.

When AI is inactive, Serval still delivers messages to connected channels and notifies subscribers — it just does not generate an AI response.

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Email Settings

Each team’s email channel has its own configuration. Navigate to Team Settings > Channels > Email to manage these settings.

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Trust and domain settings

These settings control who can send emails to your team and how Serval treats those senders.

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Reply and auto-response settings

These settings control how Serval sends emails back to requesters.

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Subscriber settings

These settings control how subscribers are managed based on email CC headers.

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Subscribers

A subscriber is anyone who receives notifications about activity on a ticket. There are several ways someone becomes a subscriber:

• Requester — The person who created the ticket via email is automatically subscribed.
• Assignee — The team member assigned to the ticket is automatically subscribed. Assignees cannot unsubscribe.
• Email CC — When “CC subscribers on reply” is enabled, anyone in the To or CC headers of an inbound email is automatically subscribed.
• Manual — A team member can manually add someone as a subscriber from the ticket.

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Subscriber notifications

Adding someone as a subscriber does not notify them or tag them. They are not alerted about being added, and they do not see past messages unless they open the ticket. They will only start receiving notifications on future activity on the ticket.

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Removing subscribers

Any subscriber can be removed from a ticket, which stops all future notifications for that ticket. This removes all subscription reasons at once (requester, commenter, mentioned, etc.). The one exception: assignees cannot be unsubscribed. If someone is both the assignee and a subscriber for other reasons, removing them as a subscriber has no effect while they remain assigned. A removed subscriber can always be re-added later.

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CC Handling

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Default behavior

By default, when a team member sends an outbound email reply from a ticket, Serval sends the email only to the ticket requester. Other subscribers are not CC’d. To include subscribers on outbound emails, enable CC subscribers on reply in your team’s email settings.

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CC subscribers on reply

This setting changes behavior in both directions: Outbound emails (Serval to external):

• All active ticket subscribers are automatically added to the CC line.
• The primary recipient (usually the requester) appears in the To field; everyone else is CC’d.
• Deactivated users and shared mailboxes are excluded from the CC list.

Inbound emails (external to Serval):

• Anyone in the To or CC headers of an incoming email is automatically added as a subscriber (with reason “mentioned”).
• If the CC’d person does not already have a Serval account, one is created for them (see External Users and Guests below).

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BCC handling

BCC recipients on inbound emails are not added as subscribers and are not visible to Serval. This is standard email behavior — BCC headers are stripped by the sending mail server before delivery.

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External Users and Guests

When an email arrives from someone outside your organization, Serval handles them based on your domain allowlist:

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Trusted domains (allowlisted)

If the sender’s domain is in your allowlist and passes DKIM verification, they are created as a regular organization member. They have the same access as any other user in your org.

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Untrusted domains

If the sender’s domain is not allowlisted (and “Allow all domains” is on), they are created as an organization guest. Guests have limited access:

• They can only see and interact with tickets they are associated with.
• They cannot browse other tickets, teams, or internal data.
• Their access is scoped to the specific conversations they are part of.

This also applies to CC’d recipients. If “CC subscribers on reply” is enabled and an inbound email CC’s someone from an untrusted domain, that person is created as a guest and subscribed to the ticket.

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Mailing lists and forwarded email

When emails arrive through mailing lists (e.g., Google Groups) that rewrite the From header, Serval looks for X-Original-From and X-Original-Sender headers to identify the actual sender. This ensures the ticket is attributed to the right person, not the mailing list address.

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Best Practices