Emails with attachments

[Drew Davies]

Morning everyone,

We've had a few people who have emailed our Service Desk regarding an open ticket and their email contains an attachment (a .doc or something similar). Although the email itself is being added to the relevant ticket, the attachment isn't being added to the 'Attachments' section. Is this something that's a config we need to turn on somewhere?

Currently we need to scroll through the timeline, view the email, save the attachment then go back to the ticket and add it.

 

Thanks in advance

[Guest]

@Drew Davies We are currently investigating this. We will get back to you with feedback soon

 

Thanks

 

Pamela

[David Hall]

Hi @Drew Davies

I think this post probably provides the best response to your question. 

I will ask our Product Managers to review this again in response to your post.

Kind Regards,

Dave.

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Drew Davies

The automatic adding of attachments for emails that have been used in a Routing Rule to raise a request had not been implemented due to concerns raised by customers where requests would have the potential to be filled with images provided in email signatures.  The was the original behaviour when manually raising a request from an email which resulted in hundreds of attachments for some requests where email conversations were continued between the customer and the Service Desk.

One thing that we could look at is making it easier to manually take an attachment in an email viewed from the timeline and have it added as an attachment on the request.

For now, to help find these emails in the Timeline, you can use the Timeline Filter and select ''System''.  There will also be an attachment icon on the emails that include attachments.

Regards,

James

[Drew Davies]

Hi @James Ainsworth,

I had a feeling that the signature images may have been involved with this. Is there no way to simply automatically add all attachments that aren't image file types? Most attachments for us are Word docs/Excel spreadsheets (although I would understand if this isn't the case for most people).

Failing that you could have a modifiable setting that dictates a minimum image file size to qualify for automatically being attached? E.g. any images >200KB auto-attach and anything less than that doesn't?

 

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Drew,

We hadn't considered restricting the automatic adding of attachments for a particular file type or the size.  The problem with the size option is that a text file could easily be very small if it was a log file that contained a couple of lines. You will have mix of some attachments being added and others not. 

While the automatic raising of requests using the Routing Rules is great for automatic emails sent from monitoring systems or from web forms,  there can be more flexibility with manually raising requests from the emails in the Shared Mailbox.  Selecting attachments is one of those things you can do when manually raising from an email.  I know that some customers find it a challenge to monitor the email queue as well as the request queue, but capturing the right information at the time the request is raised can certainly help speed things up later on.

Regards,

James

[Hannah Jeffries]

 

@James Ainsworth

Regarding your comment "For now, to help find these emails in the Timeline, you can use the Timeline Filter and select ''System''.  There will also be an attachment icon on the emails that include attachments."

Our team has noticed that the paperclip reflecting an attachment is not always on the System responses. We've had multiple examples where customers add an attachment and respond via email, but Hornbill does not reflect the paperclip so we do not have a visual that an attachment was added by the customer. This is resulting in delays as we are scrubbing through responses to attempt to find the attachment. Any ideas? I'm also opening a support case. Thank you!

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Hannah Jeffries

Thanks for your post.

I will see if I can replicate what you are experiencing while the support case is being looked at.

Regards,

James

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Hannah Jeffries

would it be possible to post a screenshot of a system message where the attachment icon is missing?  Be sure to mask out any names or email addresses if displayed on the screenshot.

Regards,

James

[Hannah Jeffries]

@James Ainsworth

See below ticket #16125 

[James Ainsworth]

@Hannah Jeffries Under the More Actions menu on the bottom right of the screen shot you should be able to use the View Email option access the full email which should also indicate that this particular message had an attachment. Can you check that this is the case.  There are some settings that restrict the size and file types used on attachments and I just want to make sure that it is not actually being stripped from the email.

Regards,

James

[Hannah Jeffries]

@James Ainsworth

If I click on 'view email' I can then see the attachment. But, up front, I have no indication that an attachment exists.

[Victor]

@Hannah Jeffries ticket #16125 was processed by routing rules (System AutoResponder). The routing rules will process the email but they will not process attachments. This is the current design: the routing rules are simply not designed to process the attachments. Therefore the only way to see them is via the "View Email" option. Please not that this is only for emails processed by routing rules.

[James Ainsworth]

@Victor

I agree that attachments will not be added directly to a request when the Routing Rules are used, however this is not what is being asked.  It seems that on occasion the icon that highlights that an email has an attachment is not displayed.  This does normally show even when using the Routing Rules.

[Adambingley]

On 4/4/2018 at 9:12 PM, James Ainsworth said:

@Victor

I agree that attachments will not be added directly to a request when the Routing Rules are used, however this is not what is being asked.  It seems that on occasion the icon that highlights that an email has an attachment is not displayed.  This does normally show even when using the Routing Rules.

Hi James, 

With regards to this, can 'clicking' the paperclip show you a list of attachments for you to select from, its quite frustrating having to look through the email.

Thanks

Adam

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Adam,

I'm not sure if that is possible, but I'll try and find out more.  We are currently working on an option that will include these attachments in the Attachment section of a request when requests are raised from the Routing Rules.  Possibly that will help.  This should be available over the next 6 weeks.