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How to enable email duplication detection and suppression
Email servers can occasionally send duplicated emails to FocalScope. This can be a source of annoyance and cause agents to make costly mistakes: e.g., confirm the duplicates of a purchase order, etc. To eliminate these issues, FocalScope can be configured to detect and suppress email duplication throughout the system (all personal and shared folders). This also eliminates redundant information from being stored in FocalScope's database. This article details how to enable email duplication detection and suppression in FocalScope.
Please note, it is highly recommended that you download and reference the attached PDF diagram while reading the rest of this article.
Cause
Microsoft Exchange server is known to send duplicates of emails to POP3 and IMAP mail clients. This usually occurs when there is a change to the original email produced in an Outlook client that has a native RPC connection to Exchange. An example of this would be when marking an email for follow-up in Outlook; this can trigger a duplicate email to be sent out by the Exchange server.
Troubleshooting
The easiest way to spot duplicated emails (or legitimate messages that may appear as duplicates) is to analyze the email headers.
- Open the email in question by double-clicking it
- In the [Message Properties] window, click [View] and select [Message Headers] (see Figure 1). The email body contents will change to display the normally hidden email header information
- Compare the [Message-ID], [Date],[From], and [Subject] headers. If, at least, the [Message-ID] and [Date] headers are identical for two emails, then an email duplication has occurred
Figure 1 - Accessing the email headers
Tutorial
Enabling email duplication detection and suppression
Please note, if newly added email accounts in FocalScope pass the POP test yet remain unable to retrieve any emails from the mail server, disable suppression.
- In the [Main menu], select [Screen > Administration]
- Click the [Administration] tab
- Navigate to the [Global Configuration > E-mail Parameters] folder
- In the right-hand pane, click the [Advanced] tab
- Tick the [detect email duplicates] flag to enable detection of duplicated emails as well as hide them from view
- Tick the [suppress email duplicates] flag to bypass saving duplicated messages to the database, entirely
- Click the [Save] button to activate email duplication detection and suppression
Figure 2 - Email duplication detection / suppression options
How FocalScope automatically detects duplicate emails
FocalScope will detect duplicate emails based on the following criteria (if email duplication detection is enabled):
- Identical public email ID (Message-ID header) and sent timestamp (date header)
- Identical subject and from fields
- Identical internal ID (UID), as provided by the email server
Spotting duplicate email detection and suppression in FocalScope
- Hover the mouse cursor over the leftmost icon in the message list and wait for the yellow balloon to appear
- If the selected ticket has any duplicated emails elsewhere in the system, then the [<n> duplicates detected] field will be visible and populated with the number of duplicate messages as well as their suppression status (if the [suppress email duplicates] option has been enabled)