NorthMail is the company email client that runs inside a remote session on a requester's simulated workstation. It is a separate thing from your own SysDesks Mail inbox in the sidebar, which is where you communicate with requesters as the technician — NorthMail is the requester's mailbox, on their machine, and it is what you open when a ticket is actually about their email not working correctly.
NorthMail is built with a genuine settings model behind it, not a static inbox. Its layout follows a familiar desktop mail client: a folder pane on the left, a message list, a reading pane, and a ribbon of Home, Send/Receive, Folder, and View tabs across the top. Every one of those tabs does something real, because the incidents built around NorthMail are caused by specific client-side settings, exactly the way real email tickets often are.
Settings that drive real tickets
- Send/Receive > Work Offline — takes the client off the server. Mail already downloaded still displays normally, which is what makes this symptom look like a broken mailbox from the requester's side, while nothing new sends or arrives until it's switched back.
- Home > Rules > Manage Rules & Alerts — inbox rules that can file a specific sender's mail into another folder automatically, before the requester ever sees it land in their inbox.
- Home > Junk > Junk E-mail Options — a blocked-senders list. An address or an entire domain placed on it gets delivered straight to Junk Email instead of the inbox, every time.
- File > Automatic Replies — an out-of-office responder that keeps answering on the requester's behalf until it is explicitly turned off.
- View > Filter Email — a list filter (typically Unread only) that can make an inbox look like most of its contents disappeared, when nothing was actually deleted.
- The Outbox — a single oversized attachment stuck at the head of the send queue blocks every message queued behind it.
Because each of these is a real, independent piece of state, an incident built around NorthMail has a genuine root cause you have to find rather than a single obvious button to click. The status bar at the bottom of the NorthMail window is the fastest way to orient yourself — it tells you directly whether the client is connected, working offline, or currently showing a filtered view, before you go looking anywhere else.
Fixing a NorthMail ticket means changing the actual setting that's misconfigured — switching Work Offline back on, disabling or deleting the specific rule that's misfiling a sender, removing an address from the blocked senders list, turning off automatic replies, clearing a view filter, or resolving a stuck Outbox item by removing the oversized attachment and resending. Once the setting is corrected, NorthMail's own display updates immediately to reflect it — mail that was hidden reappears, the Outbox clears, the status bar changes — which is the same live confirmation you would get from a real mail client, and it's what the ticket's resolution condition is actually checking behind the scenes.
Because these are genuinely independent settings, some can be combined or coincidental: a requester's message list might look filtered while a separate rule is also quietly diverting a coworker's replies, and both need to be found and corrected before the ticket's resolution condition is actually satisfied. Read the requester's description carefully, then read the client's own status bar and folder contents — the app is telling you exactly what state it's in.
The folder pane on the left always shows the standard set — Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, Deleted Items, Junk Email, Outbox, and Archive — plus any custom folder a rule is actively filing mail into, which only appears once something is actually routed there. Unread counts on each folder are always accurate to what's really unread, independent of whatever view filter happens to be active, so the folder pane and the message list can genuinely disagree in a way that's diagnostic rather than confusing once you know to look at both.
NorthMail here is entirely separate from the technician-facing NorthMail you use in your own SysDesks Mail sidebar tab to talk to requesters — that one is your inbox as the person working the ticket. The NorthMail described in this article is the requester's own mailbox, simulated on their device, and it is what breaks and gets fixed as part of email-related incidents.