Loops and dupes

NOTE  Also review the following article: FAQs.

Incoming Email Processing allows you to set up a closed loop of communications between your customer, and resources (such as technicians) at your local organization. If all participants use Reply or Forward when communicating via email, all communications are automatically carbon-copied to the customer ticket, project, or task in Autotask. With this tool, tracking labor in Autotask can now be accomplished from a technician's mail client on a smart phone.

What is a duplicate?

Before you can deal with duplicates, you first have to define what a duplicate is. In Autotask, the Duplicate Ticket Handling system setting defines duplicate tickets in incoming email processing. It also specifies what action Autotask will take when a duplicate ticket is detected. This system setting is found in > Admin > Features & Settings > Application-wide (Shared) Features > System Settings > Service Desk. Refer to Configure the Duplicate Ticket Handling system setting.

New issue or existing one?

If you were to convert every email that comes into a mailbox into a new ticket, you would end up with a large number of duplicate tickets that are part of the same conversation, and really should be one ticket. The challenge is to determine whether an incoming email is about a new issue, or is part of a conversation about an existing one.

The incoming email processor makes a simple determination:

How we prevent infinite loops

But how do you prevent endless loops and service degradation if a customer has auto-reply turned on?

It is possible that Incoming Email Processing could result in an endless loop when auto-reply is turned on. To prevent infinite loops, Autotask limits the number of incoming emails from the same sender with the same subject that will be processed in any 5-minute time period, to two.

  • If the subject line does not contain a ticket number, a second ticket will be created.
  • If the first ticket's ticket (task, project) number is included in the email subject line of the second incoming email, one ticket and a ticket note, project note, task note or time entry are created.
  • The third and any subsequent emails will be thrown out.

Troubleshooting