Best Practices for Emails and Inquiries

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?

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