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How to set up FocalScope's Email Processing Rules

Email Processing Rules are a powerful tool in FocalScope that enables fine-grained customization of how FocalScope should automatically handle and / or divert particular emails entering the system. The rules are conditional statements that can be set up system wide or tailored to a agents' personal folders. This article details how Email Processing Rules are configured and used in FocalScope.

Tutorial

Setting up Email Processing Rules

Please note: Before you proceed with setting up Email Processing Rules, you should have mapped out the logic for the particular emails you want FocalScope to handle without user intervention. This ensures that you create the smallest amount of rules to complete the task, and eliminates potentially obscure and unintended behavior.

Because the conditional statements for Email Processing Rules are self-evident, a simple example should serve to demonstrate rule condition can be combined to create almost any desired behavior in the system. To see a full explanation for each Email Processing Rule action, navigate to the 'Behavior of Email Processing Rule actions' section at the end of the article.

Example Scenario: You may wish to divert all emails sent by an important customer to the sales department to a manager for direct engagement. As such, you would need the customer's email address, the name of the manager to divert the customer's emails to, and a rule condition to move the priority customer's emails to the manager's personal folder. With this logic in mind, it becomes much easier to define the rule scope as follows:

  1. In the [Main menu], select [Screen > Administration]
  2. Click the [Administration] tab
  3. Navigate to the [Global configuration > Email Processing Rules] folder
  4. In the right-hand pane, right-click and select [New]
  5. In the [Email Processing Rules] window, define the rule for the above example scenario:
    1. Specify a [Name] (choose a descriptive one that clearly states the rule objective) for the rule
    2. Se the [Rule scope] - this sets the rule to operate either on the personal folder of a specific agent or shared ticketboxes in the system. Please note: The [Rule Scope] is crucial to ensuring proper execution of the rule conditions
    3. Tick the [Turn on] flag if the rule is to be set active after being configured and saved
    4. Now define the rule conditions, actions, and final properties. As per the example scenario, we want to capture all emails coming from a particular customer, and this is how it is done:
      • Tick the [from any of the following email addresses] condition
      • Click the [link] inside the condition and enter the email address of the customer whose emails we wish to capture
    5. The rule action(s) that the system must perform can are configured in the same way as the rule conditions:
      1. Tick [move to the specified folder] action
      2. Click the [link] inside the action and set the folder as the manager's (Matthew's) personal folder
      3. Additional actions can be specified to highlight the emails affected by the current rule or to assign the corresponding tickets to the manager or another agent
    6. In the rule properties we can see a 'plain English' version of the Email Processing Rule. This is where we can make any final tweaking to the rule conditions and actions to ensure we get the desired outcome
  6. Click [Ok] to save and enable the rule
  7. Continued in next section...


Figure 1 - Defining an Email Processing Rule

Setting Email Processing Rule priority

Please noteEach Email Processing Rule has a priority which will determine the order in which the rules are executed in the system. The priority allows rules to be 'chained' together conditionally to create very specific email routing rules or handling processes for various emails. 

Set rule priority as follows:

  • Click the [up] or [down] arrows of a rule (highlighted in red) to change the priority of that rule (higher placing means priority execution of the rule over lower placed rules) in relation to other rules. Please note: Rule priority is scope-dependent, meaning that a rule which operates in the system (shared ticketboxes) state can only have its priority set based on other rules operating in the same scope



Figure 2 - Setting Email Processing Rule priority

Behavior of Email Processing Rule actions

  • Move to the specified folder - diverts affected messages to the specified target folder
  • Mark with specified color - changes the message line text color (as seen in the message list) of affected messages to the color selected from the color palette
  • Disable autoresponder - prevents any active Autoresponders from triggering on the message
  • Assign to specified agent - assigns affected tickets to a particular agents
  • Close the ticket - permanently closes affected tickets
  • Blind forward to the following email address(es) - forwards affected messages to the specified email address(es). Any reply from the destination address is sent to the original email and Cc'ed to the folder where the 'blind forward' action was triggered
  • Add to the following ticket queue - adds affected tickets to the specified Ticket Queue, which will then assigned to agents according to the Ticket Queue configuration. Please note: It is recommended that you create a dedicated Ticket Queue--without any associated ticketboxes--for each case where this action is used. The action (adding ticket to specified Ticket Queue) will only trigger for incoming messages matching the rule conditions; thus, any manual or automatic reassignment of tickets will not trigger the rule action again. For a more detailed overview of this action, see this article
  • Mirror in the following  email group folder - will mirror (not copy - which duplicated data) affected messages in the associated 'email group' folder

Additional Information

How to automatically close certain tickets with Email Processing Rules



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