Autotask ticket email for a company
Short answer
Point Autotask at the Watchbill mailbox, turn on ticket notes, and match the company from one subject pair. The recovery is threaded to the down message.
How The Watchbill helps
- On Pro and Business, a down check can email the address your ticket system already turns into a ticket.
- The recovery message uses that same path.
- Email alerts are included on every plan, including Free.
This guide is the Autotask mailbox setup for a down check and the recovery that follows it.
On Pro or Business, open Alerting, then PSA ticket email, and choose Autotask. Paste the mailbox Autotask already reads. Put the organization name in Company when the subject should carry one pair. Send a test to a test company before the rest of the clients.
Board is optional and is written as a label in the body. The recovery sets reply headers to the down message. It does not close the first ticket by itself.
What you type
The PSA menu is Autotask. The ticket email is the custom mailbox address, not a person's inbox and not alerts@thewatchbill.com. Company is the organization name as Autotask spells it. Board is optional. It is written in the body as Board: when you save one. It is not an Autotask queue id.
A name with a colon, or with // already in it, is left out of the subject. Autotask treats a colon as the start of a contact name, and a second // pair fails the match. The body still has Company: so a person can see the name. If the company is blank, the subject stays [Watchbill] Down: or [Watchbill] Up: plus the check name.
What the mail contains
The subject is [Watchbill] Down: or [Watchbill] Up: and the check name. When the company is safe, Autotask destinations append one pair: //Northwind//. That is the shape Autotask's mailbox help describes for organization matching. One pair only. The letter layout puts the summary on the first body line, so the pair is in the subject, where the match can see it.
The body includes Dedup: with the same key on the down and the up, Watchbill-Message: with the down message id, and Company: plus Board: when those fields are saved. Recovery adds Watchbill-Recovery: yes.
The down message sets Message-ID to <wb.{token}@thewatchbill.com>. The recovery sets its own Message-ID and sets In-Reply-To and References to the down id. The token comes from the dedup key. Whether the mail host keeps a caller-supplied Message-ID was not checked with a live send. If the host replaces it, Autotask's Message-ID checkbox will not see the id The Watchbill computed.
This mail does not send #S= or #T=. Autotask's entity page says those change status only from a resource, and only with a time entry. Do not add them in a workflow you expect this mail to trigger.
What to set in Autotask
Activate Incoming Email Processing if that screen is hidden. Use a custom mailbox and turn tickets on. Turn ticket notes on. The incoming-email page places notes on Advanced. Basic processing creates tickets only, so a recovery becomes a second ticket.
Enable "Use Message-ID to help prevent duplicate tickets." Organization matching looks for one //Organization// pair, or //Organization:Firstname Lastname//, in the subject or the first visible body line. Confirm the subject contains one pair and no colon in the name.
Autotask's loops page says a subject with no ticket number creates a ticket, and a subject that contains one attaches the mail as a note. The Watchbill never receives that number, so it cannot put it in the subject. The same sender and the same subject are limited to two processed messages in any five minutes. A test down and a test up are those two. A third test inside five minutes can be dropped. Wait, or change the check name, before you send again.
A Service Desk workflow can look for Watchbill-Recovery: yes in a note. The workflow-rules page does not publish a worked example that sets status because a note contains a sentence, and the condition list was not copied from a live screen. Write the rule in your tenant and watch one recovery. Do not assume the first ticket closes.
A client that should not share the mailbox
On the client, choose Use a set on this client and check the Autotask destination. Set the company for that client when the mailbox is shared and the organization is not. Leave the client on Inherit the account set when the account mailbox and the account company are right.
A check can replace the client set. Use that only when one target should land on a different company. The alerting list names the clients that use the destination. All clients means every client that inherits the account set.
If the account mailbox changes, inheriting clients follow it. Clients with their own set keep the old mailbox until you edit them. After the change, look at the client column. A short list of names means those names need a look.
If two tickets open
Two tickets are what Basic processing does, and what Advanced does when the second mail is not recognized as a note. Check that notes are on, that the Message-ID checkbox is on, and that you waited long enough to see the second mail. Then open the recovery ticket and the down ticket and write down what Autotask did.
A test from the PSA card sends the same shape and can open a real ticket. Send it to a test company first. The Watchbill does not receive the ticket number Autotask assigns.
How The Watchbill helps
On Pro and Business, Autotask ticket email sends when a confirmed outage opens and when it closes. The subject can end with one //Company// pair. The recovery is threaded to the down message. There is no REST connector, and the recovery line does not by itself close the ticket. The shared mailbox comparison is in ticket email.
Sources
Checked 12 Oct 2026.