mail round tripping issues

tkilshaw

As far as I understand the built-in email facilities of Aware IM, there is a problem connecting incoming mail back up to its sender.

Suppose that BO Contact is intelligent.

Suppose that when an email is sent to a Contact the To address is set to the Contact.EmailAddress.

If the user replies from the address that they received the original email on, the From address on the email reply can be used by Aware to look up Contacts which match that email address.

But there is no way to tell the original Aware sender that an email they sent has a response.

This is partly because Aware can only receive email from a single email account. If Aware could receive email for multiple email accounts this problem could be solved.

When an original email is sent it would have as a return address JohnBrown@acme.com, not sales@acme.com for example. That information could be used to resolve the recipient. But as long as all incoming Aware email must come through a single email address, this is a problem.

The kind of application I'm developing would be used in situations that have 5 to 10 users, so hopefully email server polling issues would be manageble.

Could Aware be made to work that way? Or is there another solution to this problem?

thanks,

Terry

aware_support2

Terry,

Supporting multiple accounts for incoming emails is a good idea. However, I think there is a more elegant design solution to the scenario you have described, even with a single account for incoming emails.

The idea is to register the staff member who sent email to a Contact when saving the outgoing email in the system. When a reply comes back from the Contact, get the staff member from the latest outgoing email sent to the Contact and send a notification to the personal email address of the staff member that a reply from Contact is received.

One benefit of this approach is that a notification can be sent to multiple people, for example to the staff member and his manager. This may be useful when the staff member cannot respond (on vacation, etc.) but somebody has to take action. Also, the staff member can be out of the office (no access to the system) but be checking personal emails using PDA etc. This design is similar to online forums where multiple people can subscribe to a topic and receive email notifications when a new post is added to the topic.

A variation to this design would be to assign a staff member to each Contact. This way a staff member would be notified on a new email from a Contact, even if the email was not a reply to any email originated from the company. This also allows for a better management of staff assigned to Contacts. If a staff member leaves it would be possible to run a process to re-assign all his Contacts to another staff member.

Yet another alternative would be to find a staff member by the To Address in the incoming email and to email him a notification to his personal email address, or simply forward the original email.

Let me know if any of these is acceptable.

tkilshaw

Thanks for your reply. I don't think that any of the proposed solutions works for us.

The idea is to register the staff member who sent email to a Contact when saving the outgoing email in the system. When a reply comes back from the Contact, get the staff member from the latest outgoing email sent to the Contact and send a notification to the personal email address of the staff member that a reply from Contact is received

This approach fails if two staff members send email to the same contact at about the same time. The incoming email reply will be routed to the most recent sender.

Also the use of the word "notification" here is ambiguous. Do you mean a notification in the Aware sense? Or just being notified in the plain English sense?

Assigning a staff member to a contact is not an option. Within our application accounts are assigned to staff members. An account may have 0 or more contacts. A contact can be in 0 or more accounts.

Using the To: adddress would, I think, require implementation of multiple accounts for incoming emails. Otherwise the To address is just the address of the Company, and will be the same for all staff members.

Perhaps you intend the same address to be used by all staff members but qualified with their own name: John Brown info@quantech.com?

But that has a number of drawbacks. In particular, if the user does not use his email client's Reply button, but just types in info@quantech.com, then there is no way to route that properly.

thanks,

Terry

aware_support2

Terry,

By notification I meant an email that the system sends to a personal address of a staff member when an email from a contact is received. As for the To Address, you are right - it is the address of the company so the suggested solution, in fact, will not work.

> Assigning a staff member to a contact is not an option. Within our application accounts are assigned to staff members. An account may have 0 or more contacts. A contact can be in 0 or more accounts.
I would get the system to register the incoming email to the contact and then send an email to staff members/managers assigned to all accounts linked to the contact. This is to ensure that somebody within the company will get the email even if the staff member who sent the original email (if any) is unavailable. Otherwise the reply from the contact to the original sender may go unnoticed. If the staff member is available, others can ignore the broadcast.

If the contact is not linked to any accounts, the incoming email can be forwarded, for example, to the receptionist, or just be marked in the system as unread/unassigned.

tkilshaw

Thanks. I think we will use something similar to your last suggestion.

Terry

tkilshaw

Looks like I'm changing my mind on this one again!

There is simply no way to disambiguate to whom incoming emails are meant to be sent, because any RegularUser may send an email to any Contact without an Account being involved.

I really don't see a sensible way to do what is needed without multiple acounts for incoming emails. That would solve many problems.

How possible is it that you might implement this soon?

thanks,

Terry

aware_support2

Terry,

Support for multiple incoming email accounts is on our TODO list, but at this stage I cannot say when it is going to be implemented. In the meantime consider assigning an incoming email to the staff member who has last sent an email to the given contact. More often than not it would probably be the right person. If not, the staff member would re-assign it.