Automating emails received from clients

[revellbikes]

Afternoon all,

Does anyone know of a way to get the task server to monitor Outlook for certain emails? I.e going to a central email address (rather than Fee Earners) which is setup on the task servers session, then pick out a case reference from the subject and put it onto that case?

I know there is a way of doing this using "Email Diary Import" but it doesn't seem very robust as you have to specify the number of characters into the subject that the case reference is. If they reply with "RE:" then this can be accounted for but the client may not do this.

Ideally I'd want the functionality of the "Email Case Import" function where I can specify certain key words to pick up on and then just allocate to a case?

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

[steve]

hi,
At one site we have a routine which uses VB in Outlook to do the matching/parsing in the subject line (stripping RE: etc and looking for keywords). We do keyword filtering here, and prepend one of several case references to the beginning of the subject ,before forwarding it to the account monitored by Email Diary Import.
No doubt you could make some code that converts the email subject/sender/body into fields inside a text/xml attachment, along with a caseref, then forward it to another address for importing with Email Case Import instead. Some pseudocode for outlook vba below

you'll need a general declaration to register for events

Code: Select all

Private WithEvents olInboxItems As Items

then a subroutine to run at startup to capture new emails landing in the inbox:

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Private Sub Application_Startup()
 Set olInboxItems = Session.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox).Items
end sub

then the code to parse the subject on emails as they land in the inbox (or other folder as you see fit)

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Private Sub olInboxItems_ItemAdd(ByVal Item As Object)
    If TypeOf Item Is MailItem Then
        Set olMailItem = Item
'use olMailItem.Subject olMailItem.Body etc as required to retrieve and set message subject and body
end if

not the most elegant solution, requiring outlook to remain open and macros and all that, but it works for us.

[revellbikes]

Thanks for this.

Looks like an enhancement request then as it doesn't seem beyond the reals of posibility that proclaim could scan email content for a case reference or key words and import accordingly.

For the time being I'm going to use "Email Diary Import" I think and try figure out the options.

Not sure what it means by "Subject Delimiter" and "Subject Phrase for Unallocated"?

May come back to the Outlook stuff when I get some more time!

[revellbikes]

Managed to resolve this with some help from Eclipse.

Turns out Proclaim automatically strips out any "RE:" or "FW:" etc...

You just need to specify the length of your case reference and the position within the Subject line.

[Code Killer]

Hi,

I've set this up for us recently and it's great, a huge help but is there any way to dictate a portfolio it goes into rather than the current case hander and possibly assign it to an incoming mail script.

We're running on 3.3.1.04 currently.

Cheers

[akeelan]

Hi,

Would this pull-in the attachments on the email to the appropriate case just like dragging it in manually into the history would do? We get a ridiculous amount of emails into a central mailbox every day and helping the team out would help us in IT out too.

Thanks

[Code Killer]

Hi akeelan,

Yes it does, the only issue being that unless the subject indicates what the attachments are you can't see them until you've actioned the task and assigned it an incoming mail script also the tasks can be cancelled which doesn't then drop anything onto the file.

Cheers

[akeelan]

Hi Code Killer,

As long as it would put them into the history with the email that's great!

Thanks