You might wonder how Deskpro can know that a certain reply submitted by email belongs to a particular ticket. We refer to this as message routing. That is, how an email messages gets added to the proper ticket.

Reply Codes

First, it's important to know that every reply that Deskpro sends out to users and agents contain special hidden codes that identify the ticket it belongs to. These special codes exist in the email in a few places:

• At the top of the email body as HTML attributes
• At the bottom of the email as hidden text (i.e. font-size 1px or invisible text colour). You might notice these if your email client removes styling.
• And finally, the codes are also sent in email headers that often get sent back (i.e. message refs and thread refs).

Using these reply codes are the primary mechanism Deskpro uses for message routing. When a reply comes in, if the user has replied to an email that Deskpro itself sent the user (as is most often the case), then 99% of the time the email will contain the reply codes and Deskpro knows with certainty which ticket the reply belongs to.

If Deskpro routes a message based on the codes, then all other routing mechanisms are not used. For example, the subject is irrelevant because Deskpro found the ticket via the codes.

For agent replies to get routed properly, these reply codes are mandatory. If an agent sends a message to the helpdesk that does NOT have these special codes (which also act as a kind of authorisation code), then the email is treated like any other user email as described below.

Replies without codes 

If a message comes in without reply codes, then Deskpro has a decision to make:

• Is the email a reply to a ticket, and the reply is simply missing the reply codes?
• Or is the  email a brand new ticket?

To determine if the email is a reply, Deskpro falls-back on subject matching. Deskpro strips common prefixes from the subject like (such as RE:), gets a list of the users recent tickets, and then checks if any of the users recent open tickets match the subject. If a subject match is found -- then it will add the message as a reply. If no match is found, then it will accept the email as a new ticket.

Subject matching options

From Admin > Emails > Advanced Settings, there are a few options you can toggle to control subject matching:

• Enable subject matching: You can comlpetely disable subject matching if this is causing problems for you. Sometimes you might decide to do this is you get a lot of similarly named tickets from a single source which can be common with automated systems.
• Only match subjects on the same email account: When enabled, subject matching will only match against tickets that originate from the same email account. For example, two similarly named emails that were sent to sales@example.com and support@example.com would not be considered the same ticket.
• Enable subject matching on ALL email messages: When enabled, this will enable subject matching on all tickets, even those that do NOT have a reply (RE:) prefix. (By default Deskpro doesn't attempt to do subject matching on bare subject lines because most of the time those are brand new emails that should be new tickets.)

FAQ

Why was my agent reply added as a new ticket instead of a reply to an existing ticket?

• ALL agent replies MUST include the reply codes described above. This means, in effect, that the ONLY agent email replies that get routed as replies will ALWAYS be when an agent replies to a Deskpro notification. (i.e. the email will include the "--- Reply above ---" line).
• Additionally, the agent reply MUST be from an email address associated with the agent account. i.e. if you reply from a personal account, it will be rejected.

Why didn't a users reply get added to the proper ticket?

• It means that reply codes were missing and the subject line did not match.
• Or, alternatively, the ticket might be resolved and your helpdesk permissions (Admin > CRM > Usergroups) disallow users from re-opening tickets.

Why didn't a users subject match as a reply? It looks like it should have.

• By default, Deskpro only does subject matching when the subject of the new email contains a reply (RE:) prefix. If the user didn't include that prefix, then subject matching would not be executed at all. You can change this from Admin > Emails > Advanced Settings.
• By default, Deskpro only matches emails sent to the same email account. If the users original email was sent to sales@ for example, and the second email to support@, then these are two different email accounts and they would never be considered the same for subject matching. You can change this from Admin > Emails > Advanced Settings.
• Subject matching only matches if the user actually belongs to the ticket (either the ticket owner or as a CCd user). So if the user replied from a different email address, then from a Deskpro point of view, that is two different users and it would not detect a match.
• Finally, make sure subject matching is actually enabled from Admin > Emails > Advanced Settings.