How Communications Links Incoming Emails

When Communications emails are sent from an item such as a Ticket, Account or Workflow Communications will thread any replies that are received back into a single conversation that is viewable on that item.

IDI has two different mechanisms it uses to link the incoming message with the existing conversation it belongs to. This article details what those two methods are with the goal of helping administrators understand where to start troubleshooting when the linking is not working as expected.

Reply To Address

When an email is sent from Communications, tracking information is included in the email’s REPLY TO property.

REPLY TO is a property on an email that allows the address that is used to REPLY to an email to be different than the original FROM address.

Looking at a Communication email, the FROM address looks something like this:

Choosing to reply to this email results in a TO address that looks like this:

Information linking the email to Ticket 1122755 is contained in the TO address of the reply email.

When IDI receives the reply, it will utilize the linking information in the TO field to match the reply to the conversation it belongs with.

Forwarding Emails and Advanced Matching

When an email sent from Communications is forwarded this ‘REPLY TO’ information contained in the link information is overwritten.

Consider this scenario:

• Working a ticket, you send an email to a customer asking them if the issue is resolved. Here is what the properties on that email look like:

  From	support.idibilling.com
  To	customer@company.com
  Subject	Ticket 1122755
  Body	Is the issue resolved?
  Reply To	support+t=ticket+i=1122755.idibilling.com

• The recipient forwards the email to a coworker to get their input.

  From	customer@company.com
  To	coworker@company.com
  Subject	FWD: Ticket 1122755
  Body	Please let IDI know if you are all set now.
  Reply To	customer@company.com

• The coworker then forwards their reply to CostGuard

  From	coworker@company.com
  To	support.idibilling.com
  Subject	FWD: Ticket 1122755
  Body	Yes, everything is back online.
  Reply To	coworker@company.com

You can see how because the email was forwarded at one point the original REPLY TO address for the IDI platform which contained the link information is gone.

In these scenarios, the IDI platform will use alternative methods to find the proper link for the incoming email by looking at the REFERENCES and IN-REPLY-TO fields contained in its header information.

These fields contain unique ID’s for previous messages that are part of the overall conversation thread. This means that a reference to the original email sent from the IDI platform may be contained in these header fields. If the IDI platfo0rm finds a match between one of these previous message ID’s and a message already in Communications it links the incoming email to that message.

These properties are not fields that mail clients display to users however are present in most messages and can be used by mail systems to match emails to threads.

When Link Information Cannot be Determined

In most instances, using these headers as an alternate method to link incoming emails will work as expected. There may be scenarios however where this information is not available in the header. This could include scenarios such as:

• The email has been forwarded numerous times before being sent back to the IDI platform and the earlier REFERENCE header IDs are being over-written.

• Email is forwarded using a mail client that does not properly support all the email header fields.

• No previous message in the thread was ever sent from the IDI platform but the email is forwarded to a Communications mailbox.

In these instances, the link information cannot be determined and the message will appear in the Communications module as an unlinked message. If needed, an administrator can manually provide the proper object in the IDI platform to link the message to at this point.