How often a mailbox is checked
Check a mailbox as often as every minute, and set the lookback window that is also your outage budget.
Who can do thisWorkspace Administrator
Two settings on a shared mailbox decide how quickly mail becomes a Helpdesk ticket and how much mail you can lose if collection stops: the Frequency under Schedule & status, and the Lookback window (minutes) under How far back each run reads. Both are on the mailbox form, whichever provider you use. Open it with Edit on the mailbox's row in Connections.
The Integration Hub is in English only. Its buttons, fields and messages are quoted in English in these articles, in the Danish articles too, exactly as you see them in the app.
How often the mailbox is checked
With Trigger set to On a schedule, choose a Frequency. A shared mailbox is the only kind of connection that can run more often than every 15 minutes.
| Frequency | Notes |
|---|---|
| Every minute, Every 2 minutes, Every 5 minutes | Mail only. The form adds "Frequent checks only download new mail, so a short interval costs very little." |
| Every 15 minutes, Every 30 minutes | The fastest choices for every other connection. |
| Hourly | The default for a new mailbox. Runs on the hour. |
| Every few hours | Every 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12 hours (4 when you first pick it). |
| Daily, Weekly, Monthly | At a Time (UTC); weekly on a Day, monthly on a Day of month from 1 to 28. |
| Advanced (cron) | Your own expression in Cron (UTC). |
All times are UTC. Under the picker the form describes the schedule in words, such as "Runs every 5 minutes", and previews the next runs. A cron expression faster than every minute is refused with "Scheduled syncs run at most every minute. Use Run now for on-demand." See Schedules and Run now.
With Trigger set to Manual (Run now only), the form warns: "Nothing is collected until someone presses Run now. For a mailbox that should keep producing tickets on its own, pick a schedule."
What frequent checks cost
Every run costs 1 credit plus 5 credits per MB, out of 10,000 credits per workspace per month. A mailbox has a special rule: a run that finds no new mail pays no run fee. The megabytes of every run are still counted, and the run still shows in the run count. Mail that is already stored is not downloaded again, and two runs of the same mailbox never overlap. So checking every minute costs little on a quiet mailbox. See Usage and credits.
The lookback window
Lookback window (minutes) decides how far back each run reads. Every run re-reads that stretch of mail and skips anything already turned into a ticket.
- Leave it blank for the default: 1440 minutes, which is 24 hours.
- Otherwise enter 15 to 43200 minutes (30 days). Outside that range the field says "must be between 15 and 43200 (30 days)".
- A wider window costs a little more per run.
The window is also your outage budget
There is no bookmark of where the last run stopped: each run simply looks back over the window. If collection stops for longer than the window, any mail that arrives and then falls outside the window is never picked up, and there is no way to fetch it afterwards. Collection can stop because the connection is disabled or paused, because a client secret expired, or because of an outage.
So with the default of 24 hours, you have 24 hours to fix a broken mailbox before mail starts to be lost. If your team cannot react within a day, for example over a long weekend, widen the window.
Mailboxes are never auto-paused, so nothing stops by itself and tells you. Add the alert + No successful run in 24 hours and keep the window longer than the time it takes you to react. See Alert rules and Needs attention.
The window must cover the gap between runs
A window shorter than the time between two runs would leave a hole on every run: mail arriving in the uncovered part would never be fetched, and every run would still report success. The Hub therefore refuses to save it:
"the lookback window (N min) is shorter than the gap between runs (N min) - mail arriving in between would never be fetched"
- Every few minutes, hourly, every few hours or daily: the default of 1440 minutes already covers the gap.
- Weekly: the window must be at least 10080 minutes (7 days).
- Monthly: the gap is 28 days or more, close to the 30-day maximum, and some months are longer than the maximum window. Keep a Helpdesk mailbox on daily or more often.
The check only applies to a scheduled mailbox. A manual mailbox reads the window each time someone presses Run now.