BlueFolder's notification system supports email "conversations" via the simplicity of an email "reply", enabling your team and your customers to seamlessly communicate about work orders right from their email inbox.
It works as simply as it sounds. If a user or a customer receives an email notification from BlueFolder about a work order, they can simply reply to the email and BlueFolder will process the reply as a new comment on the related work order. A new comment created in this way can also trigger an outgoing email notification, containing the content of the reply, to the work order's assignees, customer, and other related users. That email notification can then be replied to, triggering another comment, and another outgoing notification. This cycle can continue indefinitely, allowing your team to have seamless end-to-end communication without having to log in to BlueFolder all the time. Your customers will also likely welcome this type of real-time communication and status updates that keep them "in the loop".
In addition to email communication, comments entered directly in the BlueFolder application can be part of the "conversation". If outgoing notification preferences are setup accordingly, comments added directly in the application will be sent to related users/customer contacts as outgoing email notifications and can be replied to as described above.
Configuring Settings for Email Conversations
In Settings > Email > Incoming Email Settings, you can enable the email conversations feature by clicking the checkbox in the Adding Comments via Email section. Note: this feature is not available in all price plans.
By default, outgoing notifications from your BlueFolder account will come from an email address such as "notifications@your-account.bluefolder.com". This special email address allows our system to process replies and add them to your account as work order comments. There are, however, several settings that govern the outgoing and incoming email conversation feature and are worth looking at when setting up your account.
Learn more about email settings...
Email replies from your employees & customers
When one of your employees or customers receives an email notification about a work order, their reply can be processed as a new comment on the related work order. Outgoing email notifications include a line at the top of the email that states "All reply text above this line will be added to the Work Order". As stated, the text content of an email reply must be entered above that line in order to be processed by BlueFolder.
The following guidelines apply to email replies received by BlueFolder:
- Email replies received are matched to an employee or customer based on the from-address on the reply.
- Email replies received from unknown email addresses (not matching a user or customer contact) are not accepted as replies.
- Email replies with no text content are not processed as replies.
- Any files attached to an email reply will be added to the associated work order as file attachments.
- Email replies containing only file attachments (without text content) will be accepted.
- Emails are matched to a Work Order by checking the subject line for "Work Order #1234" or "Work Order 12345", then checking the body of the email for the same terminology.(Work Order terminology is based on your Work Order settings).
Note that incoming emails that are NOT replies can be converted into new work orders if incoming email settings are configured to allow that.