A new feature that has been requested from the users has finally come to the HelpDesk! You can now reply to your open tickets via email.
When you get a notification of a reply to your HelpDesk ticket, you can now hit reply in your email client instead of logging into help.nrao.edu.

While using this new feature, we ask you to keep in mind the following:

• Please be aware that you can only reply to tickets via email. If you wish to open a new ticket, you must log into help.nrao.edu and click on 'Submit a Ticket'.
• If you decide to reply to a ticket via email, please do not edit the subject. The HelpDesk uses the subject of your email in order to locate which ticket your response belongs. If you change the subject it will not be able to find the ticket and your reply could be lost.
• While replying by email, if you do not delete the quoted text this will be posted to your ticket along with your reply. As messages could get very long, we encourage you to delete the quoted text in the body of the email prior to sending us your response.
• When you reply via email, your message is not posted to the HelpDesk for a staff member to see for 10 minutes. If you are under a time restraint and need faster answers please log into help.nrao.edu to reply to your ticket.
• If you cc another user of the HelpDesk, they will be able to reply to the email and it will be posted on the HelpDesk, but they will receive no further updates from the ticket. You must request that the other HelpDesk user is added in the cc of the ticket on the HelpDesk by a staff member, or continue to add them to the cc of your responses.
• If the email you cc is not a registered user of the HelpDesk and they reply, the message will not be posted to the ticket and the staff will not see their response. Please encourage them to register on the HelpDesk if you wish to include them on the ticket.
• You can only reply to a ticket from an email that is associated with a helpdesk account. If you forward email from the email used on the helpdesk to another email and try to reply, it will not work.
• Currently there is a limit to a message size set at 10MB. This is a feature that we are changing to a higher limit soon.

For staff members of the HelpDesk:

• You can also reply to the HelpDesk via email! But please be aware that when you reply via email, your message is posted for the user to see. You must log into the HelpDesk if you wish to use our internal note system.

• If your user account and staff account share the same email, you may notice some issues with the notifications. Please use the website when dealing with a ticket as a user.