.Best Practices for Emails and Inquiries v2019.2

Setup Requirements

Your Organization will need to have your email administrators create an actual email address for PCR-360 to read emails from. Once that is provided, PCR will require the following information:

SMTP: Host and port
IMAP: Host and port
Email Address
Username
Password

Notifications

When Notifications are enabled, the following Notifications trigger when the system reads a new Email message:

Other Notifications can be created to trigger based on these. It is important to remember that Notifications do not go to the Thread tab. Meaning any information from the Notifications are only available if a User accesses the Notification Event Log.

Frequency of checking for Emails

The email account is checked every 15 minutes. Please contact PCR-360 is this frequency is not sufficient for your Organization's needs. Each time the email is checked it will only look for messages received since the last time it ran, so if a message was received, read, then marked unread after the email is checked, that email will never be loaded into PCR-360.

Do's and Don'ts

Do: When messaging about specific SD Items, be sure to include the SD Number in the email's subject line.

PCR-360 uses the SD Number to determine what, if any, SD Items needs to have the email attached to.

Don't: check the email account with an email client, such as Outlook.

If you read the messages before PCR-360 can see them then they will not be loaded into PCR-360.

What is an Inquiry?

An Inquiry is generated when a User emails the designated Service Desk email account. Based on the contents of the email you may then determine if the Inquiry should be Voided or converted into another issue. An Inquiry is typically Voided if it is an invalid email, spam, or duplicate email. For more information see the wiki article on Requests.

How does the Thread tab work?

The Email Thread tab provides Users with a history of email correspondences between the Requestor and the User's organization

All messages sent and received from a specified email account can be read and if the messages contain the SD Number in the subject line they will be processed and attached to the indicated SD Item. If the subject does not contain an SD Number or it contains a number that is not recognized the message will create an Inquiry.

Note: sending messages from the Thread tab automatically inserts the SD Number into the Subject.

How Do I Block Emails?

1 Adding an Email Address
2 Removing Blocked Emails
- 2.1 .Blocked Emails v2019.1
- 2.2 .Blocked Emails v2020.1

Blocked Emails Grid example

Admin Users can block specific email addresses from submitting inquiries and correspondence by adding the addresses to the 'Blocked Emails' Grid. See the article Requests in the Service Desk category for more information on how the application processes emails.

Entries on the Blocked Email Grid are most commonly created from within Service Desk. When editing an Inquiry item, Users can press a button to add the source's email address to the blocked list and delete the Incident itself.

Adding an Email Address

To add an email address to the Blocked Emails grid and block the address, click the button located immediately above the Grid.

Add New Email Block form example

In the form, input the complete email address to be blocked. Once the Email field has been defined, click the button. The address appears as an item on the Blocked Emails Grid and is blocked indefinitely by the PCR-360 application.

To block an entire domain, use ' * ' as a wildcard entry. For example, specifying *@pcr.com blocks all emails from the pcr.com domain.

In addition to wildcards, regular expressions may be used for both the email and subject values. They must be surrounded by slashes, for example /^blocked*/ will block anything starting with blocked. 'Whitelists' can also be created using a negative look ahead regular expression, for example /@(?!pcr.com)/ would whitelist pcr.com. Please note that only a single whitelist entry can be added, or else all emails will be blocked.

Removing Blocked Emails

If an Admin user would like to remove an address from the Blocked Emails Grid and enable correspondence from/to this address, select the appropriate item on the Grid and click the button located immediately above the Grid.

Once the address has been removed from the Grid, it is no longer blocked by the PCR-360 application.

.Blocked Emails v2019.1

.Blocked Emails v2020.1

The EMAIL_BLOCKED_MARKAS_READ flag is used to determine how to treat blocked emails when Service Desk is creating Inquiries.