E-mail Robot: General Information
Discover how E-mail Robots streamline communication, automate responses, and enhance productivity in digital correspondence.
Table of Contents
Overview
E-Mail Robot monitors mailboxes and processes received e-mail messages according to the configuration by creating Tickets or other activities (Change Requests, Problems, KB Articles etc.) or by adding comments to already existing activities.
User Matching
E-mail Robot matches Initiator of an activity, Creator of a KB article or a comment author by the sender address of the e-mail message using Mail Address and Private Mail Address attributes of a Person (user). Additionally, if exact match yields no result, a shortened sender address (without top-level domain) is used to match against Person mail addresses. E.g. if no user is gound for e-mail address user@mail.company.com , it is shortened to user@mail.company. and matched again so it can find corresponding Person with Mail Address user@mail.company.de.
Ticket (Activity) Matching
E-mail Robot detects an e-mail message as related to a Ticket (or Tickets) using the following criteria in the specified order:
-
Ticket Number match in e-mail subject and (if enabled) in e-mail body.
System searches subject and body for ticket number preceded with hash character "#" (e.g. #TCK001234). -
Message-ID header / E-mail chain match (only if Ticket Number was not found).
System analyzes message headers for related e-mails that are already associated with the Ticket.
If related Tickets are found for the e-mail message, then its contents (body and attachments) are added as a new Journal comment to those Tickets. Otherwise a new Ticket or other activity according to the mailbox configuration is created using the e-mail contents.
An important fact is that the E-Mail Robot itself does not apply any changes to processed E-Mails, like adding, changing, or removing HTML styles. In case this happens please check the overall system settings.
- Removed styles - Change applied by HTML sanitizer (Core component) to remove potentially unsafe HTML markup.
- Processed E-Mail looks different - This might be caused by the style used with the HTML literal control (Core UX).
- Style of outgoing mails does change - This might be caused by E-mail Engine (Core component), responsible for sending outbound e-mails like those triggered by compliance rules.
S/MIME Encrypted and Signed Message Support (Version 26.2 and Later)
E-mail Robot supports processing S/MIME encrypted and/or signed e-mail messages. An option to select encryption certificate was added in version 26.2. When certificate is selected, it is used for decrypting encrypted messages and validating digital signature of the message being processed. Signed message content integrity can be also validated without a certificate (using sender's public key contained in a message).
In case the certificate is not provided, or an error occurs during decryption and/or singature validation, the e-mail message will be ignored by E-mail Robot and processed according to the configured behavior for ignored messages.
Synchronization Intervals (Scheduling)
Inbound e-mails are processed every 15 minutes by default. E-mail processing schedule is managed from the Administration application by "Service Management - Inbound Mail Robot" Engine Activation, which is responsible for the E-Mail Robot.
It is not recommended to set schedule activation period to less than 5 minutes.
Specific E-Mail Processing
Processing Out-of-Office (OOO, alternatively: Out-of-Facility / OOF) e-mail messages
E-mail Robot adds e-mail message content as a Journal comment to all tickets of the type (Ticket, Incident, Problem) configured for the mailbox, have the sender user as related user. Related user is a creator, initiator, responsible person, or a related user of the activity. If a mailbox is configured to create Knowledge Base Articles or no relevant tickets are found, then nothing is added or created, and the message is ignored.
There is no standard definition of Out-of-Office e-mail message format. To categorize e-mail messages as OoO messages, E-mail Robot uses the commonly accepted rules based on e-mail content and technical data, mostly on a combination of e-mail headers and their values.
Below are the currently used rules (as of Enterprise Service Management version 12.0.1), which combined lead to an e-mail message being categorized as an Out-of-Office e-mail message:
- E-mail message has property Item Class with value "IPM.Note.Rules.OofTemplate.Microsoft" (Relevant only for older versions Microsoft Outlook. Not present in e-mail message headers, but saved as custom header when an e-mail message is exported as EMR file);
- Header Return-Path is absent or has a special empty value "<>" and one of the following:
- Header Auto-Submitted has the value "auto-replied",
- Header X-Autorespond is present in the message,
- Header X-Autoreply is present in the message,
- Header X-Auto-Response-Suppress has the value "All" and (starting with version 26.2.0) header X-MS-Exchange-Inbox-Rules-Loop is present in the message;
- Header Return-Path contains the actual reply e-mail address and:
- Header Auto-Submitted has the value "auto-replied" and header X-Autoreply is present in the message.
E-mail message headers can be examined in the e-mail source obtained by either saving a message as EML in Microsoft Outlook or other e-mail client application (might be modified by the client application and differ from the source received by E-mail Robot) or exporting directly from the server as EMR using EmailRobotTool.exe utility from Enterprise Service Management installation and opening saved file as plain text.
In case the e-mail message is found, which is an obvious Out-of-Office message, but not processed as such by E-mail Robot due to not conforming to the current detection rules, a proposal for detection rules adjustment can be filed.
Processing Non-Delivery Report (Non-Delivery Receipt, NDR) E-Mail Messages
NDR messages are processed depending on whether the related tickets are found for the message being processed:
- If related tickets are found: E-mail Robot adds a special comment about message delivery error to all related tickets and New Information Received flag is set for those tickets.
- If related tickets are not found: a new Incident is created with a specific Subject and Description describing the e-mail delivery failure. Incident is created with the default category, but is assigned to the Enterprise Queue Profile configured for the mailbox.