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freescout-help-desk / freescout

FreeScout — Free self-hosted help desk & shared mailbox (Zendesk / Help Scout alternative)
https://freescout.net
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Handle auto-replies of mailbox agents #4035

Closed bastf closed 4 months ago

bastf commented 4 months ago

First of all, I want to thank you for how great FreeScout is - it's really great!

I have come across a situation where FreeScout could improve its internal handling of auto-replies:

If a mailbox agent (user) has

these auto-replies are currently treated as standard replies within the conversation. Therefore, the customer will also receive a notification with the content of the auto-reply. The customer might be confused if an agent is not available and might think that the whole helpdesk is on holiday ;-)

For customers, auto-replies are still interesting for mailbox agents.

A solution could be to check the auto-submitted header of incoming emails and if the sender matches one of the mailbox agents, ignore the reply or maybe just add it as an internal note to the conversation that does not inform the customer about the auto-reply content of the individual agent.

I'd love to hear what you think! If you have any suggestions on how this could be done differently, please let me know. Thank you very much!

freescout-helpdesk commented 4 months ago

these auto-replies are currently treated as standard replies within the conversation. Therefore, the customer will also receive a notification with the content of the auto-reply. The customer might be confused if an agent is not available and might think that the whole helpdesk is on holiday ;-)

We don't quite get what you are trying to say. Are you using some custom modules to send your auto-replies?

bastf commented 4 months ago

Hey, thanks for your reply. I'm sorry about that. The auto-replies are sent from the mailserver.

The scenario in detail - setup:

Now agent 1 goes on holiday, and on the mail server of acme.org (outside of FreeScout), he sets up an auto-reply (out-of-office) to be sent to all incoming mails - for his mailbox on the mail server. (It is not possible to exclude email addresses or domains from the auto-reply).

Then:

  1. customer@gmail.com sends inquiry to support@acme.org
  2. FreeScout fetches the new unread mail from support@acme.org, creates a new conversation, sets the mail to read and sends out notifications to agent1@acme.org and agent2@acme.org, which are sent with support@acme.org as the sender.
  3. The mail server receives the incoming mail (notification for new conversation) for agent1@acme.org and sends the auto-reply to support@acme.org.
  4. FreeScout treats the auto-reply as a new reply to the conversation and customer@gmail.com gets the auto-reply from agent1 with support@acme.org as the sender. (Also agent2@acme.org gets the notification).

I hope this makes the scenario clear :)

My proposal would be that FreeScout does not process auto-replies from the agents' mailboxes as replies to the conversation to the customer.

raramuridesign commented 4 months ago

@bastf You could try creating a workflow to simple delete these auto replies. We do this on our side and it works well. M.

bastf commented 4 months ago

Hey @raramuridesign - thanks for your suggestion! I've already tried this, as there is an email header field for the condition available. But I could not find any condition that filters the workflow so that only incoming replies from FreeScout users (agents) are affected. Auto-replies from customers are relevant and should not be deleted. Creating and managing one workflow per FreeScout user is also not really the way to go. How did you solve this?

freescout-helpdesk commented 4 months ago

Fixed in the master branch and will be published in the next release.

Meanwhile you can add the fix manually and test it: https://github.com/freescout-helpdesk/freescout/commit/c269311ef58da0545291dc31a57044e3d27fdf36

bastf commented 4 months ago

Thanks!!!