---
title: Ticket Settings
description: "**Support → Ticket Settings** holds the desk-wide options: how tickets are numbered, which department the portal files its own tickets in, what your first-response target is, whether tickets auto-assign, whether visitors may open tickets without an account, whether the ticket…"
url: "https://rackhelm.com/documentation/ticket-settings/"
updated: "2026-09-24"
category: Support Desk
---

# Ticket Settings

**Support → Ticket Settings** holds the desk-wide options: how tickets are numbered, which department the portal files its own tickets in, what your first-response target is, whether tickets auto-assign, whether visitors may open tickets without an account, whether the ticket form asks which package a ticket is about, what may be attached, and the signature appended to every staff reply. This article covers every field on the screen and is for whoever administers the desk.

## Before you start

> **Note:** The screen lives at `/admin/settings/support` and requires the `edit_support_settings` permission. The sidebar entry under **Support → Ticket Settings** is shown only to Super Admin, so if you have granted the permission to another role and the menu entry is missing, navigate to the URL directly. See [Roles & Permissions](/docs/roles-and-permissions/).

The form is one form across seven tabs — **General**, **SLA**, **Notifications**, **Access**, **Ticket form**, **Attachments** and **Signature**. **Save settings** writes all of them, and a validation error jumps you to the tab holding the offending field.

## General

![The General tab of Ticket Settings with Support email, Ticket prefix, Start number and Department for automatic tickets fields](/wp-content/uploads/rackhelm-docs/support-ticket-settings-general.png)
The General tab. The tabs across the top are all part of a single form.

| Field | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Support email** | Required, and must be a valid email address. Seeded as `support@example.com`. It is stored and published as an application-wide value; in the current build nothing sends from it automatically — outbound ticket mail uses your configured mail sender, and inbound mail uses the mailbox on each [email route](/docs/email-routing-imap-piping/). |
| **Ticket prefix** | Optional, at most 10 characters. Prepended to the ticket number everywhere it is displayed, including email subjects. Seeded as `EXP-`. |
| **Start number** | Required whole number, zero or greater. The number given to the very first ticket. Seeded as `1000`. Once tickets exist, numbering follows the highest existing number and this field no longer has any effect. |
| **Department for automatic tickets** | Which [department](/docs/support-departments/) the portal files the tickets it opens itself into: suspension notices, failed domain renewals and add-on setup requests. The default is **— No department —**. Not seeded, so it is unset until you pick one. |

> **Warning:** Set the prefix before you take your first ticket and then leave it alone. Inbound email is threaded back onto a ticket by finding `#` plus the prefix plus the number in the subject, so changing the prefix breaks threading for every reply to an older notification email.

### Where automatic tickets go

Three things in the portal open a ticket without anyone asking them to: the overdue-suspension job, a domain renewal that the registrar refused, and an order containing add-ons that need setting up by hand. Before this field existed they all wrote a hardcoded department id of `1`. Department keys are UUIDs and `tickets.department_id` carries no foreign key, so the insert succeeded against a department that did not exist and the ticket landed in a department nobody was a member of.

Leaving the field on **— No department —** is a deliberate, safe choice rather than a broken one: a ticket with no department is visible to *every* staff member, so nothing disappears. Choosing a department narrows it to that department's handlers, which is what you want once one team owns billing suspensions.

> **Note:** If the department you chose is later deleted, RackHelm does not write a dangling id — it logs *"The department chosen for automatic tickets (…) no longer exists; filing the ticket with no department."* and files the ticket with no department instead. There is no guess-by-name fallback.

## SLA

| Field | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Response time goal** | Optional whole number of hours, zero or greater. Sets the target for the *first* staff reply on a ticket. Not seeded, so the goal is off until you set it. |

With a goal set, each ticket shows a chip comparing the time it was opened against the first staff message on it — see [Working a ticket](/docs/working-a-ticket/). Leave it blank or set it to `0` and the chip disappears entirely.

> **Note:** The goal is a display measure only. RackHelm does not escalate, reassign or notify anybody when a ticket breaches it. It also measures the first message carrying a staff author, so an **Automated notice** posted by the platform does not stop the clock.

## Notifications

| Field | What it does | Default |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Auto-assign on reply** | When an agent replies to a ticket that has no assignee, that agent becomes the assignee. | On |
| **Notify assignee** | Emails a staff member when a ticket is assigned to them. Assigning a ticket to yourself never sends an email, whatever this is set to. | On |
| **BCC notifications to** | Optional. A comma-separated list of addresses blind-copied on ticket notification emails — new ticket, reply, closed and auto-close notices. Every address in the list is validated individually. | Empty |

> **Note:** Even with **Auto-assign on reply** switched off, closing a ticket that has no assignee still assigns it to whoever closed it, so a finished ticket always has an owner.

> **Tip:** The BCC list is the working way to keep a shared mailbox copied on ticket traffic. The **CC a copy to** field on an email route looks like it does the same job, but the copies are not sent in the current build.

## Access

| Field | What it does | Default |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Allow guest tickets** | Publishes the public contact form at `/contact`. With it off, that URL returns a 404 and submissions are rejected. | Off |

See [Guest tickets and the contact form](/docs/guest-tickets-contact-form/) for what the flow looks like once it is on.

## Ticket form

This tab holds one control, **Ask which package the ticket is about**. It decides whether the customer ticket form carries a **Related package** dropdown, and is stored as the `ticket_package_mode` setting.

![The Ticket form tab with the Off, Optional and Required choices for asking which package a ticket is about](/wp-content/uploads/rackhelm-docs/support-ticket-settings-ticket-form.png)
The three modes are radio cards. **Optional** is the default on an install that has never saved this setting.

| Mode | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| **Off** | "Don't ask. The field is hidden on the ticket form." Nothing is stored, and a posted `order_item_id` is dropped rather than validated. |
| **Optional** | "Show the field. The customer may leave it blank." The default when no value has ever been saved. |
| **Required** | "The customer must pick a package to open a ticket." |

Three behaviours are worth knowing before you choose **Required**:

- The list is the *account owner's* packages, so a sub-account raises the ticket against the packages it can already see. Cancelled and terminated items stay in the list on purpose — "please explain this final invoice" is a ticket about a package that has gone.
- A customer with no packages at all is never blocked. The rule relaxes to optional in that case and the form says "You have no packages on this account yet — go ahead and send your ticket in."
- Guest (logged-out) tickets never show the field, and tickets that arrive through an [email route](/docs/email-routing-imap-piping/) never carry a package. Tickets that already name one keep showing it whatever you choose here.

Once the picker is on, the chosen package appears as a chip in the ticket header and as a **Related package** dropdown in the ticket's properties panel, where staff can correct or clear it. See [Working a ticket](/docs/working-a-ticket/).

## Attachments

![The Attachments tab with the Allow attachments switch, an Allowed extensions field and a Max upload size field in megabytes](/wp-content/uploads/rackhelm-docs/support-ticket-settings-attachments.png)
Switching **Allow attachments** off greys out the two fields below it, but they still submit.

| Field | What it does | Default |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Allow attachments** | Master switch for files on tickets — portal, contact form, staff replies and inbound email alike. | On |
| **Allowed extensions** | Required. Comma-separated, no dots, e.g. `png,jpg,pdf,zip`. | `png,jpg,jpeg,gif,zip,txt,log,pdf` |
| **Max upload size** | Required whole number of megabytes, at least 1. Applied per file, not per message. | `10` |

Both fields remain required even when the switch is off, which is why they are made read-only rather than disabled — a disabled input submits nothing and the save would fail validation. Full detail is in [Ticket attachments](/docs/ticket-attachments/).

## Signature

The signature is appended to every staff reply, both from the admin ticket screen and from a staff reply posted through the client portal. It is a rich-text field, sanitised with HTML Purifier when you save.

Three merge variables are available as clickable chips above the editor, and are replaced when the reply is sent:

| Variable | Replaced with |
| --- | --- |
| `{Staff member name}` | The name of the agent sending the reply. |
| `{Staff member role}` | The agent's role, falling back to "Support Staff". |
| `{Company name}` | Your company name. |

These are case-sensitive and spelled exactly as shown — they are a different set from the `{name}`-style placeholders used by [canned replies](/docs/canned-replies/).

> **Warning:** Keep the signature short and structural. It is appended to the stored message body of every reply and is also rendered into notification emails, so a large block of pasted HTML from an email designer bloats every ticket in the system and will largely be stripped by the sanitiser anyway.

> **Note:** A customer's own reply never receives the signature, and neither does an **Automated notice** the platform posts. It marks a message as coming from your support team, so it is only ever added to staff-authored replies.

## Settings that are not on this screen

Three ticket-related controls live elsewhere:

- **Auto-closing inactive tickets** — the **Auto Close Tickets** job under **Schedules** in the admin sidebar (`/admin/system-schedules`). The closing message it posts appears as an **Automated notice**.
- **The captcha on ticket forms** — **Security → Captcha Protection** (`/admin/settings/captcha`), where a provider and the **ticket** form must both be enabled. Seeded off.
- **Inbound sender authentication** — the `inbound_mail_trusted_authserv_id` and `inbound_mail_require_authentication` settings, described in [Email routing and IMAP piping](/docs/email-routing-imap-piping/). Requiring authentication now defaults to *on*, so read that article before you turn an email route on.

## Troubleshooting

| Symptom | Cause and fix |
| --- | --- |
| Changing **Start number** does nothing | It only applies to the very first ticket. Afterwards numbering follows the highest existing number. |
| "The ticket bcc email must be a single email or a comma-separated list of valid emails." | One entry in the list is malformed — usually a trailing comma or a stray space inside an address. |
| The contact form 404s | **Allow guest tickets** is off. |
| No SLA chip on any ticket | **Response time goal** is blank or zero. |
| The package dropdown is missing from the customer ticket form | The mode is **Off**, the column is missing, or the ticket is being raised from the guest contact form, which never shows it. |
| Suspension and failed-renewal tickets appear in everybody's queue | **Department for automatic tickets** is on **— No department —**. A ticket with no department is visible to all staff by design. Pick a department to narrow it. |
| The signature is missing from replies | It is empty, or the message was posted by a customer or by the platform rather than by a staff member. |
| Signature formatting collapsed after saving | HTML Purifier removed markup it does not allow. Rebuild it with the editor's own tools. |
| Saving fails with no obvious field | Check every tab — the error summary lists all of them, and RackHelm switches you to the first tab containing an invalid field. |