Email Reply Processing
Service lets customers update incidents by replying to email messages. However, sometimes customers include the original message in their reply, quoting back the email they received. There are several ways that the Techmail utility can manage this scenario.
When the Techmail utility detects an email reply, it attempts to identify the part of the message containing the customer’s reply, and strips out any text that may have been quoted back from the original message thread. In this way, new replies are added to the incident as a new entry in the incident thread, while text from previous thread entries is ignored. Techmail uses several methods to determine which blocks of text in a message consist of previous thread entries.
Most email clients mark or “block quote” the original message when replying. In text messages, the original text is often block quoted by inserting a greater than symbol (>) or a vertical bar (|) at the beginning of each line of the original text. In HTML messages, the original message is usually enclosed in block quote HTML tags (<blockquote>). Parameters in the block quote HTML tag indicate how the message should display, for example, each line begins with a vertical bar or an indent. The Techmail utility block-quoted reply detection method finds block-quoted text and removes it from the email, leaving only the reply from the customer.
If you enable the EGW_REPLY_BETWEEN_ENABLED configuration setting and select the Force Reply Between Lines check box, Techmail can easily separate the reply from the original email text, as customers are directed to compose their reply between two distinct line markers. If you enable the configuration setting but do not select Force Reply Between Lines on the Incoming Email settings of the mailbox, Techmail first checks for a reply between the lines. If it does not find text between the markers, it looks for the > or | block-quoted text indicators or block quote HTML tags. In addition, when the Force Reply Between Lines check box is not selected, the system inserts checksum code at the bottom of the email so that the reply part of the email can be identified.
If a customer replies to multiple points within the original email, intermixing the reply with the original text, the message may contain multiple blocks of quoted text. In this case, the replies may refer to the original text above them, which may be important, so Techmail includes the entire email message in the incident.
If a customer replies within the original text, and the reply text begins with a block quote, such that the reply is indistinguishable from the original text, Techmail can determine that additional text has been added within the original text by comparing checksums in the reply to checksums in the original message. If the checksums differ, the entire email is added to the incident to ensure that no reply text is lost.
Techmail can also detect and remove “boilerplate” messaging while leaving the customer’s content intact. Boilerplate messaging is text that has been added to an email message by a mail client, such as a line of embedded advertising text. This helps to ensure that the thread is not diluted with advertising and contains only information pertinent to the discussion.