Agents will sometimes receive an Email to their individual Email account that would be better handled through your helpdesk. For example, the Agent may not be the best person to address the issue, may be too busy to help, or just doesn’t want support correspondence cluttering up their inbox.

Inbound ticket forwarding lets Agents forward an Email to one of the helpdesk’s Ticket Email accounts, where Deskpro processes it as a Ticket from the original User, not the Agent.

For example, user@example.com emails carol.smith@yourcompany.com, who forwards the message to help@yourcompany.com. If inbound Ticket forwarding is enabled, your helpdesk will create a Ticket with the User user@domain.com.

To enable or disable this function, go to Channel > Email > Settings > Forwards into Helpdesk and toggle Smart-parse emails forwarded into the helpdesk by agents.

When an Agent forwards a message into the helpdesk, any text entered above the forwarded message will be processed as either a reply to the User or an Agents only note, depending on the setting you select.

Forwarded Message Detection

This is the process Deskpro uses to determine if an Email has been forwarded:

1. Subject match: The helpdesk looks for a string like ‘FW:’, ‘FWD:’ etc. at the beginning of the subject line of an Email from an Agent’s Email account. It takes this to mean that the Agent is trying to create a Ticket for a User. (Emails forwarded by non-Agents will be treated as normal Tickets).

   

2. Sender match: The helpdesk will then try and find the details for the User who originally sent the Email. Different Email programs will include this information in different ways; this is a typical example:

-----Original Message-----
    From: Victoria Johnson [mailto:user@domain.com]
    Sent: 05 November 2012 14:38
    To: agent_email@yourcompany.com
    Subject: Support Request
 copy

In this case, the helpdesk would match the User as Victoria Johnson, with the User email being user@domain.com.

In some cases, Deskpro will not be able to find the User’s details. This is typically because the format from your mail client is unknown to Deskpro, you are using an unsupported language, or your Email system has modified the headers in a way that prevents Deskpro determining the original sender. In this case an error message will be sent to back to the Agent, including the original Email.

1. Reply match: Deskpro will now look to see if the Agent added a reply. If a reply is found, this response will be emailed to the User.

2. Processing: Deskpro will now process the relevant triggers and create the Ticket.

You can configure how subject matching works with the Use a custom Subject regular expression for detecting forwarded emails option in Channels > Email > Settings > Forwards into Helpdesk.

If you enable the option, you can modify the regular expression (search pattern) used to detect forwarded Eemails. This is useful if your Email software uses a non-standard prefix and Deskpro is not processing forwards correctly.

The default pattern will match subject lines that start with any of the letter combinations in brackets, followed by a colon, e.g.:

• FW:

• fw:

• Fwd:

• FS:

The regular expression syntax used is PHP Perl Compatible Regular Expressions.