Mail Parser Separate To: and CC: in e-mail

[PeteV]

The following issue seems to be a serious design flaw in eSupport. Addressing this issue would solve a lot of problems. This issue is not really a bug, and not really a request either, but something in between.

1. It is currently not possible to send "internal" Replies (similar to Notes) via e-mail.
2. Current Notes lack a lot of important functionality that is available for Replies, and current Notes are not in-line with Replies.

That is, it is currently not possible to effectively discuss Tickets internally (without Users reading the discussion). This is a serious problem when customer support involves "internal-only" discussions that need to be tied in with the Ticket, with occasional communication with the User (and Third Parties), to formulate the final "answer" or "solution".

This issue encompasses many forum threads, and we suggest the following relatively straightforward catch-all solution:

Outgoing E-Mail

eSupport should send outgoing e-mail From: support@company.com and CC to all non-Department (User) e-mail addresses.

This way, if a Staff member does not want to send a Reply by e-mail to the non-Department (User) e-mail addresses but only to Department Staff, they just need to remove the CC addresses, and leave To: support@company.com. From the list of recipients (only To: support@company.com, and empty CC recipients), it will be very clear that this is an internal Note and not a Reply to everyone.

Incoming E-Mail

When an e-mail message is sent To: support@company.com, and optionally CC'ed to non-Department (User) e-mail addresses, eSupport should process the e-mail in the Ticket thread. eSupport should forward all incoming e-mail messages *only* to Department Staff (if they are assigned to the Ticket or have Alerts set-up for the Department of the Ticket), and nobody else. If the sender of the Reply intended the e-mail message to be sent to Users, then they should have appeared as CC recipients in the e-mail message.

Staff CP

For the Ticket view, there should be (very near the Send button) a single-selection drop-down listbox with the entries "-" (empty; default selection), to Department Staff only, and "to Department Staff, User and CC addresses" or something similar.

1. The empty default selection will ensure that Department Staff does not accidentally choose one of the other two options by accident.
2. The to Department Staff only option will send the Reply From: support@company.com.
3. In contrast, the to Department Staff, User and CC addresses option will send the Reply From: support@company.com and CC to all User and other CC e-mail addresses.

The very limited Notes can then be removed from Staff CP entirely.

Feasibility

We have considered many alternative solutions to this problem. This solution seems to be the most all-encompassing, yet at the same time least invasive modification to eSupport -- as far as we can tell as outsiders who have not examined the source code.

It seems that it should not be difficult or time-consuming to make this modification, that it would satisfy a lot of existing customers, and that this would attract a lot of future business.

On the other hand, without such an improvement (in the short term) of the way that eSupport handles external Replies and internal Replies (i.e., Notes), eSupport will not be applicable to customer support that relies on workflow with channels of internal communications.

Please let me know if this is a feasible solution, and whether it this solution could be considered for implementation in eSupport by Kayako in the near future.


Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

[Brent]

I know it would work for me....

I had to have a Notes add in added to help solve this issue... but even that is limited for internal none customer discussions..