These settings affect how Deskpro processes email messages.

Adding agents as followers with CC

By default, if the user CCs an Agent into a Ticket email, the Agent will not be added as a follower of the Ticket.

You may want users to be able to add Agents as followers; bear in mind that adding an Agent as a follower means they can always see a Ticket, overriding Agent and Department permissions.

You can enable this feature from Tickets > Settings:

Agent replies to ticket notification emails

You can set how the helpdesk handles Agent replies to an email notification.

Any content an Agent adds above the REPLY ABOVE line can be treated either as an Agent note or sent as a reply to the User.

To change this, in Tickets > Settings, check/uncheck the Process email replies as notes instead of Ticket replies option.

All notification emails make it clear to the Agent what will happen if they reply by email. If you change this setting, it will only change the behaviour for notifications sent from that point on: you will never have a situation how a reply is actually handled is different from what it says in the notification text.

Agents can override the default behaviour using the #note and #reply  New: Email Action Codes.

Priority of email headers

Deskpro looks at the email headers to determine who the User is. Some email server configurations do not send the correct user information in the From: header. This can happen if you are automatically forwarding emails or using distribution lists.

Sometimes, the correct User address is retained in the Reply-To or X-Original-From header, even if From: is wrong.

You can set the order that Deskpro looks at headers in Admin > Tickets Settings, in the Email Settings section. Use the handles at left to drag the headers into the order you want, putting the most reliable header at the top.

Ticket forwarding: inbound

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, and have Deskpro process 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 Tickets > Forward Settings and use the Enable smart-parsing of emails forwarded into the helpdesk by agents checkbox. It is enabled by default.

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.
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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 end-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 Tickets > Forward Settings.

If you enable the option, you can modify the regular expression (search pattern) used to detect forwarded emails. 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:
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The regular expression syntax used is PHP Perl Compatible Regular Expressions.

Ticket forwarding: outbound

Agents can forward individual ticket messages via email, using the Forward message option accessible from the gear icon to the right of each message.

This is useful for forwarding messages outside of the helpdesk if they would better be dealt with as a private email conversation.

Under Tickets > Forward Settings, under Ticket Forwarding - Outbound you can change which email account is used to send the emails.

By default, the forwarded email will appear to come from ticket email account’s address, but you can choose to use the agent’s address in the From: field instead. For this to work, you may need to configure your email server to accept messages with any From: address.

Duplicate detection

By default, Deskpro rejects duplicate emails from the same user that were submitted within a short period of time.

For example, when a user sends a message with more than one accounts in the To: or CC: lines (e.g., to both sales@example.com and support@example.com), two separate email messages arrive into Deskpro. Without duplicate detection, this would cause two separate tickets to be created.

In some situations, you may not want to reject duplicate messages (for example, if you’re accepting tickets from an automated system). There is an option to disable duplicate detection in Tickets > Email Accounts under Advanced Settings.

You can see when duplicate emails were rejected in Tickets > Email Accounts under Incoming Email Log.

Subject matching

Deskpro uses a variety of techniques to determine if an incoming email message is a reply to an existing ticket.

One method used is to compare the subject line of an incoming message with the user’s existing tickets.

By default, Deskpro only does subject matching for messages when the subject line is prefixed with RE:, which normally indicates that the user was replying.

In some situations, you may want to apply subject line matching to messages without the RE: prefix (for example, if you want to accept tickets from automated systems that don’t add the RE:, like eBay).

To do this, select Enable subject matching on ALL email messages checkbox in Tickets > Email Accounts under Advanced Settings.

By default, Deskpro applies subject matching across all your email accounts. For example, if the user sends two emails with the same subject to both “sales@example.com” and “support@example.com”, their second one may be matched into the same ticket.

You may want to restrict subject matching so it only applies to messages sent to the same account. In this case, select Only match subjects on the same email account in Tickets > Email Accounts under Advanced Settings.