One thing that my users do a lot is email me directly with questions. Now, I may be the CEO, and occasionally I’ll deal with customers, but I’m not to be trusted. We have a customer service expert, and a whole team of developers who answer customer issues. But that doesn’t solve the problem of getting the issue into the support system.
So, scratching our own itch, we added a forwarding parser. I’ll admit I was inspired by 37 Signals’ Highrise—but I’m also infuriated by their implementation at times. I hope Tender’s forwarding support is better. I’ve tried to implement most of the common mail formats for forwarding email (Gmail, outlook..).
Here’s how it works. You forward an email to your support email address. It must be “from” a valid supporter email (i.e., you). The system checks the email, to see if it has a “Fw:” or “Fwd:” at the start of the subject. Then, it looks in the body of the email for the headers (from, date etc). Tender then pretends that the support email came from that user, instead of you. Bingo! If the user’s account exists, it will be attached to their user.
My Gmail inbox.
This shows up in the dashboard like so:
And the support issue shows up seamlessly:
Finally, if you decide to put a message in the first few lines (above the “On January 25..” line), note that it will be ignored. We currently plan to integrate these messages so that they’ll show up as a private (support-only) comment, however, that feature isn’t built yet.
I hope this really improves everyone’s workflow as much as it did mine.
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14 Comments
Why not just use the redirect support of Mail.app?
This is alot cleaner in what it does. It preserves existing headers (aside from Received) and adds the following header (and others) describing the source for minimal filtering. Resent-From: Worker Bee <worker>
Seems like this would be a better way to work, no parsing or munging required :)
Tim: Unfortunately what’s usually technically simple isn’t always what’s simple to users. I’ve never heard of that option before and I’m betting lots of users haven’t either. Forwarding lets us target the lowest common denominator (everyone knows how to forward emails—just ask my grandmother). A little extra work on our end, but our users get the simpler experience.
Kyle: Yer, I totally get that!
Perhaps what I was really meaning to get across was the promotion of the Redirect feature. I guess it could be a little confusing to the Joe and Jane users.
Ciao
Tim, that’s a great idea. I too didn’t know about the feature (but I also use Mailplane/gmail only).
Are you planning to support multiple languages? This is what my headers look like:
—-Ursprungligt meddelande-—Från: John Doe [mailto:johndoe@example.com] Skickat: den 20 januari 2009 13:23 Till: Emil Ämne: SV: Example subjectAs I live in Sweden and most of my clients use swedish Outlook
Emil: We plan to, but can’t say we will immediately. The addition of email makes internationalization a bit more fun than we want to tackle right off :)
Yay. Well done!
Emil: We don’t support multiple languages, but we will. Forward one to rick AT entp.com and I’ll take care of it.
We started parsing out the “On 26 Jan, Bob wrote:” reply text in several languages too. It’s not too hard, we just need examples.
Any chance that you’ll open source the parser or write a post about how you did it? I’ve wanted to add something like this to an internal app of mine, but there were so many variable that I had to look for! Do you handle dates correctly? One thing that bugs me about Highrise is that it just uses the date that the email was forwarded and not when it was actually received.
Good feature though! Thank you.
That is really really nice
Great job guys, one more step for us to adopt Tender (the only remaining one would be canned responses). And open up the billing already ;D
I use Thunderbird to receive all support issue emails. Any chance you all are going to be working with it in order to make the “Fwd” not show up in the Subject line like you’ve done with gmail, outlook,etc.?
Britt: Can you send an example forwarded message to rick@entp.com? We just need an example and we’ll do our best about supporting it.
Email sent!
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