KB

Filter Which Emails Get Turned into Tickets

2021-11-05 15:12:25

Tickets can be created through direct connection with your support inbox, or by auto-forwarding your support inbox to a OneDesk ticket creation email. When this happens, a ticket is captured in OneDesk containing the subject of the email, the email’s body, and any attachments in the email. Additionally, if the requester’s email address being captured does not yet exist as a customer record in OneDesk, they will be automatically added into the database.

However, you may not wish to have tickets showing for all email correspondence which your support email receives. Luckily, there are ways to filter these excess tickets out. The main method is through built-in filter options found in your email settings. For niche cases you may also choose to filter using an automation rule.

Option 1: Email Settings - Built-in Filters

Your email settings are found under Administration -> Emails -> Settings

Scroll to the bottom for incoming email filters.

Filter auto forwarded tickets

'Allow capturing of forwarded ticket' - When toggled off, this setting prevents anyone from auto forwarding emails to your OneDesk account. Only turn this off if you are using the 'direct connection' method of email to ticket creation.
'Only accept forwarded tickets if forwarded from' - Allows only the selected addresses to send forwarded emails to your OneDesk creation email.

Block emails from specific emails or domains

Enter email addresses (person@example.com) or domains (@example.com).

Block emails based on keywords in the subject line

Enter strings, separated by a new line. Any emails containing these strings in their subject line will not be created as tickets in your OneDesk account. (For example, auto replies or vacation notifications)

Option 2: Filtering ticket-creating emails through workflow automations

While you can use the built-in filters to prevent certain tickets, if you have a niche case you may be able to use OneDesk’s workflow automations to separate them and move them elsewhere. Separate the resulting ticket-from-email into an archived project, for example, and the new ticket is effectively filtered out from regular tickets, and out of sight.

Accessing workflow automations for tickets

To access the workflow automation section for tickets, select More Applications (bottom left side bar) -> Administration -> Tickets -> scroll down to Workflow Automations. You can modify any existing automations as you see fit by clicking on the pencil icon to the right-hand side, or create an entirely new automation with the “create workflow automation” button in the top-left.

How to filter tickets with an automation

Create a project to catch the tickets. Select the “add” button at the top of the screen, then “project”, and name your project as you see fit.
Create an automation that filters incoming tickets based on your chosen criteria, then adds them to the newly created project. Select “create workflow automation” on the top-left side of the automations menu.

For example, let's create a rule that filters tickets if the sender's email contains a certain string.
Select “ticket” under “runs on”.
Add a filter for "requester’s email" and enter the criteria to check for.
The trigger should be “item is created”.
The action will be to "change project" to the project you created in the first step.

Hit save. Now this automation which will send all tickets created from the specified email address to one specific project.

If you wish to remove these caught tickets from your project view, you can archive the project. To do this, access the location where your project is under the projects application, select the three dots on the left-hand side under “actions”, and then choose “archive project”.

Now that this project is archived, it is hidden by default within OneDesk, but will still capture tickets sent from the specified email address. If you need to access it again for whatever reason, select the three dots on the upper right-hand side, and check the box to “show archived projects”.

Option 3: Filter at the email service level

If you do not wish to filter tickets using workflow automations, you can select what emails are auto-forwarded to the ticket-creation address in OneDesk through your email provider. The process to do this varies depending on the specific provider used, so it is best to consult their individual resources. You will find these options within your account settings likely under ‘filtering’ or ‘rules’. Options can include excluding emails containing certain keywords, excluding emails from certain email addresses, and more.

Prevent looping with follower-exceptions

Additionally within OneDesk, you can set certain email addresses to never be added as a follower of a ticket-from-email that they have sent. This is of importance when you are replying to yourself for instance, as you will then be creating tickets of your own replies in a loop, and is why by default "reply@onedesk.com" is added to this list.

To access these settings, select "emails" from the menu after selecting the "administration" cog-wheel from "more applications". Then, select the "appearance settings" tab, and scroll to the bottom. Under the heading "reply" settings", there is the "never add the following emails as followers" field. You can add or remove as many emails to this section as you wish.