Email Connector - creating a ticket from a non-support box email

hi guys,

love the Email Connector, works great for emails that are sent by customers to the dedicated ticket creating email account.

However, a huge part of my day is spent reading and responding to emails sent by clients to my personal address as part of little queries or quote responses etc. Some of these emails actually need to become tickets when an email discussion turns into a request for work. Rather than (clumsily) having to ask the customer to resend their email to the ticket email address so a ticket is automatically created, I'd like to just forward (or send) an email from my email address to the email connector and have it create a ticket for me.

From reading the Wiki it would seem this is doable only if I configure the Automated Emails feature, and in the subject flag the CommitCRM Account so the connector can assign it correctly. Is this true? Would I need to create a separate email account for me to send from to be configured in the Automated Emails section as well? From what i'm reading the system will understand its an automated email only if it is sent from a specific address that you configure in the Automated Emails setup. (this wouldn't be much of an issue, just means when i forward or send an email to the connector myself I would need to change my From address)

Or am i over complicating it? Can the email connector be configured so anyone can send an email to it and by just having the correct Account flag in the subject it will pick up the correct account (ie. it doesn't necessarily have to be from the account holders email address as listed in their account to be correctly filed under their account). Would be great to just be able to put the accounts email address in the subject line myself and the connector creates a ticket for it (although ican see that this could end up bing a problem if random people emailed the connector with email addresses in the subject).

cheers
nathan

I've just thought of another way, possibly? My main goal is to get an email into a ticket so i don't have to retype the fault and any discussion that has occurred.

I could just set up a "Holding" account in Commit,with a company email address assigned (ie. holding@mycompany.com). Then any email in my inbox i want to get into CommitCRM I could just forward to the connector, changing the From: address to be holding@mycompany.com. This would presumably ad the email as a ticket under the Holding account. then I can just go into commit, open this ticket ,and copy the ticket to the correct account and delete it form the Holding account (there doesnt seem to be a way to change the account a ticket was assigned to). This means I dont have to know the email addresses assigned to all of my CommitCRM Accounts to use the Email Connector to get a ticket into CommitCRM.

Does that make sense?

It would actually be cool that if the email connector received an email from an account it didnt recognise, rather than forwarding that to the company mailbox set up for that purpose for manual processing, you had an option for it to create a ticket in a holding/queue account for allocating withinCommitCRM. That way you still get the details of the email into CommitCRM straight away and can more quickly copy it to the relevant account. Of course there are spam implications as this means any email sent to the connector would end up as aticket in the holding queue if it wasn't recognised, but it would be nice to have the option.

Hi,

Thanks for posting this.
You are correct on all the points you’ve posted, and all this can be done using the RangerMSP Email Connector (Except creating accounts by received ticket email).
There are 2 methods you can have this done easily:

• When setting your rule, you can leave the source email address blank to enable the rule on all email addresses, including your company address. This would allow you to forward any email to the RangerMSP Email Connector, and have it automatically filed to your customers existing account, by pasting your customers account# right after the Automated Email Rules Listening Keyword. You can find more info on this in this KB article.
  
  
• By creating a dummy (holding) account, and setting another Automatic Email Rule mentioned in the link above, you can give your customers the rule’s keyword + the account identifier of the dummy account so that unregistered accounts can enter their tickets into the dummy account from any email address, so that you can create a new account and copy the ticket. For example, you can set the keyword to New and the account code to account so that the first time a customer wants to create a ticket, they can start the subject line with New account. Once you copy the ticket to the new account, you can send an email (create one in Email Templates so it can be easily generated by the system) to the customer of the newly created account and that the emails can now be sent without any special keywords in the subject line.
  
  
• By using the RangerMSP Email Connector API over Email feature to receive xml transactions from a web page. This helps if you’d like to create your own web page that your customers can enter their basic information in, submit the form, form gets parsed into XML format, and have the site email the xml transaction to the RangerMSP Email Connector, so that the RangerMSP Email Connector can create the new account. Once this is done, the customer can use the Email to Ticket feature with free text emails, and their own RangerMSP account.

Let us know if you have any more questions on this topic.

Regards,
Reno Breen

Thanks Reno, option 2 will be perfect - don't need to give anything to customers, it just so i can forward my own emails from customers to the connector to get a ticket created. Presumably as well as adding a ticket to a dummy account this way i could put an existing accounts identifier in the subject and have a ticket created fro a existing customer as well?

Thanks for the KB article, i didnt even think to search - its an article answering my exact original problem :) CommitCRM rocks.

Just reading through it, fantastic. Am I right in assuming the "accnt #" field in CommitCRM is blank for all accounts by default and you set your own account numbers? Just looking at some of my accounts an there no number for them.

OF course you can also use ACcount Name in the Automated Email rules settings but presumably it has to be an exact match? Or will it match on part of the account name (as long as it can still identify it as a unique account?)

Now all I need to do is figure out how to enable regular pop3 on port 110 on my SBS 2008 server - the default setup enables secure POP3 on port 997 only which the email connector doesn't support.

Hi,

Thanks for the great comments.
The account identifier you use needs to be an exact match, or else the system will not recognize it and forward the message to internal support; if you're going to be sending the tickets from your own computer, then you can copy/paste the account identifier from RangerMSP or an exported list.

The Tickets > Details tab > Accnt# field is not assigned by default, so you can use any alphanumeric string in that field to identify your accounts more conveniently.

Hope this helps; sorry i can't help with the Exchange issue.

Regards,
Reno Breen

Great thanks for clarifying. And I wasn't expecting help with the Exchange config :)

Ok I am having issues getting the Automated Email to work with the Email Connector.

I have set up an Automated Email Detection rule as follows:

Email Detection Rule:
The Word/phrase 'CustID:' is in the email's subject line.

Account Record Detection Rule:
Account ID is found right after 'CustID:'

I have saved the settings in serverconfig.exe and restarted the Commitserver service.

In CommitCRM I have added an Account ID of BTRNOOSA to a customer account. (This is the ID: field on the Details tab, I have checked the database field name matches what is shown in the rule)

I then forward an email from my inbox to my Email Connector address (ticket@n-techsolutions.com.au) changing the subject line to read:

CustID: BTRNOOSA, this is the actual subject of the email

The connector does not create a ticket for the account. Instead it just sends the email on to the Internal Support Team email which catches stuff the email connector can't parse.

I have played with the subject line both using and leaving off the comma, and leaving and removing the space after CustID: but its the same every time.

What am i doing wrong?

nathan

Hi,

Thanks for posting this.
When using automated rules with the email connector, it is important to make sure that any key words are typed exactly as typed in ServerConfig.exe (CaSe-SensiTive), as well as not leaving a space between the listening keyword and the account ID. i.e. CustID:BTRNOOSA

In order to find out which of the rules here is not working properly, we suggest setting the top rule to have an unregistered email address and clear the keyword option in this rule, and restart the RangerMSPServer Service. Once this is done, you can use the unregistered email account to send a ticket to the system in order to see that the bottom rule is working.

Once you have managed to make this work, edit the top rule again, clear the email address, and paste the keyword from the bottom rule in that rule (CustID:).

Also, make sure that Automated Email Detection is enabled. The switch for that is located in the Main ServerConfig.exe window > Email Connector tab > Automated Emails (RangerMSPServer restart is required for this change to take effect too).

If this doesn't work, can you please send us screenshots of the rules you're to Support @ ?

Let us know how this goes.

Regards,
Reno Breen

The rules already had a blank unregistered email address. I'll send through my screenshots.

Hi,

After looking over your samples that you've emailed me, we can see that the configurations you're using don't need to be adjusted (except for the Detect automated Emails by sender address option).

We'd suggest trying to send the email with the subject line only showing what the RangerMSP Email Connector is looking for, and the rest of the data in the email body. I.e. CustID:BTRNOOSA

Let us know how this goes.

Regards,
Reno Breen

Thanks, that worked.

You really need to fix all the documentation in the Wiki as I was going by that with the examples shown, that did have other data in the subject line. Would have saved me hours of playing!

By the way, if I turn on Detect Accounts by Sender Address the ticket is put under my employee account, rather than the account specified by the rules. As its going to be my email account forwarding the tickets (rather than the clients emailing the connector directly) I’ll leave it unticked.

Kind regards,
nathan

Ok so next issue - it doesn't seem that you can change the account a ticket is under, so my default queuing account to email tickets to is pointless, i've got a stack of tickets in there that need to be put under the relevant account but can't. Am I missing something? Or can you not change the account a ticket is under?

NEvermind, found the Copy Ticket function :)