Emails Raised into Requests

[will.good]

Hi,

Is there any way to keep formatting when an email is raised into a request? i.e any pasted tables?

Currently, I think it converts to unformatted text. Ideally, we would like the original formatting to be kept in the request description once it is raised.

I realise you can just use the source email to view the original email, however we regularly delete emails from our instance as we receive around a gb of emails / attachments per month and don't need the original source emails as all the info / attachments are stored on the request when it is rasied

[Victor]

@will.good

1 hour ago, will.good said:

I think it converts to unformatted text

No. There is no conversion. The request timeline update is made using the content of the Plain Text part of an email.

[will.good]

12 minutes ago, Victor said:

@will.good

No. There is no conversion. The request timeline update is made using the content of the Plain Text part of an email.

Yeah, so essentially formatting is lost in the request description and timeline. Is there any way to change this so formatting for things such as pasted tables / graphics are kept? Reading something like this in the timeline / description of a request is useless without the formatting.

 

Examples below

 

 

[Victor]

@will.good I'm afraid not. Given that we use the Plain Text part of the email for the timeline update, which has no formatting, means there will be no formatting on the resulted timeline entry.

[will.good]

Hi @Victor

My team and I had a catch-up with Samrai yesterday, he mentioned that it should be possible to change this for the timeline entry as the information is stored differently to what is in the Request Details (summary and description) 

Could we explore including formatting in the timeline?

 

 

[Victor]

@will.good The way this functionality works currently is that it will take the plain text part of an email and use that for the timeline entry. This is how the code was written for this functionality. There is no setting or switch or something similar to change how this works without changing the underlying code for this functionality. Technically anything is possible. However, there are quite a few challenges to use the HTML part of an email to create something. It is mainly the tags, the multitude of them, that they can appear in different places in a different order plus the aspect of differentiating what is an HTML tag that needs parsed and what is an HTML tag that is not part of the formatting. And that is just tip of the proverbial iceberg. I am in no shape or form a SME on this, I will let our product management and development teams comment on this further.

[Berto2002]

@Victor an alternative would be to

1) give an option for inbound emails converted into tickets to be attached by default to the Request through the routing rules configuration and then

2) give an attachment preview option in the Request using existing standard Microsoft APIs; then the user can see the original email as a "pop-up" preview which is a gazillion times easier than downloading and viewing an attachment

[Victor]

@Berto2002 there are options available to see the original email and any emails that have been applied to a request. They are not however "attached" but "linked". So there is the issue of them not being available as link once the email is removed. I cannot comment on if and how this can be addressed, I am simply not involved in development. So suggestions are something for product and development teams to consider and discuss.