Note: This is not the same thing as the Shockey Outlook which is a Microsoft Outlook addin that allows you to click on the email and promote it to a support request with one click, or one click upload of contacts, tasks and calendar appointments. It is an email gateway that allows everyone to create new tickets in the portal just by sending an email to your support@ email address. It also supports conversations through the support@ alias, allowing you to respond to the portal and use the SLA framework to properly categorize/escalate the ticket and send proper notifications as you go along. I do not recommend the use of this feature to anyone.

Hope everyone had a great weekend. I have a new experimental feature to share with you. It is called Mail Connector, it allows you to create and update tickets through email.

In your portal you will find a new tab under Settings called “Experimental Features”; Click on it and look for your Mail Connector email address. Note the text in red. Your Mail Connector address is of xyz@tree.shockeymonkey.com

Implementation

Pick an available alias on your domain and forward it to the xyz@tree.shockeymonkey.com address.

WARNING: DO NOT MAKE THE ALIAS ADDRESS THE SAME AS YOUR BUSINESS CONTACT INFORMATION EMAIL AS LISTED UNDER SETTINGS > BRANDING. DOING SO WILL CURRENTLY CREATE AN UNBREAKABLE INFINITE LOOP.

Features

Mail Connector does the following:

• Email to the Mail Connector address from an unknown email address is rejected.
• Email to the Mail Connector address from a known email address creates a new ticket.
• Response to the email generated by the Mail Connector address updates the ticket.
• Response to the email generated by the Mail Connector are only applied if they come from the administrative account (companyid 1 or 2) or from the company that originated the ticket (any user within the company)
• Administrative response (companyid 1 or 2) to the Mail Connector address will update the ticket.
• ALL Mail Connector updates follow the defined SLA which can be granular with respect to the senders email address, so you can create specific filters for specific email addresses and sort them into adequate queues.

In short, Shockey Monkey Mail Connector is an email interface to your portal allowing you to create and update support requests through email on any device and still keep the SLA framework in place.

By the time 2.0 ships I plan to fully implement this feature and make it configurable (on/off), as well as split the mail confirmation sending address and archival copy sending address. Currently those addresses are identical, so if the message is sent to the archive and the same address is used to loop back to the Mail Connector feature which then generates the autoresponse saying that the ticket has been updated and then sends a copy back to itself which loops it back over and over and over again. So please, please be careful.

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