Question

SOme people in our organization are not quite aware of how FB is being used. The scenario is:

• A person emails our fogbugz account to create a new case and also copies other people on the email.
• An email response discussion ensues and none of the responses are captured and the person assigned to the inbox now has a chore of cleaning up and mapping incoming emails to a case.

I realize the answer can be of a few forms to work better with the process. However, I have never seen the inbox attendant ever classify an incoming email correctly , nor have I seen it map to a case if the "case: xxx" is missing. Is this possible to add?

I assume plugin can be made for that? (if the subject line matches the text of a case, then add it to that case rather than treat it as a new case)

Has anyone else dealt with this or handled it automagically? (I know how to do it with changing people's behaviors)

Case FC1846634

Answer 1

First off, I agree with you that the simplest way around this problem would just be to somehow convince people to originate their emails from within FogBugz. If only changing behavior were easy. ;)

As for the plugin part of your question: No, this is not currently something exposed through the Plugin API. I've filed a feature request for it though, because I think that's definitely something we should be opening up to our customers.

And as a bit of a discussion about the functionality you're looking for, I think it might be a little trickier than it initially appears. I think appending an incoming email to a case based on just the subject line (without something concrete like a case number) is likely to generate a significant number of false positives over time. For example, our customers often send us emails with generic subject lines (e.g. "FogBugz crashed"), and I could see these false positives being not only a pain to correct, but also confusing to people looking at incorrectly matched emails/cases in the meantime. That being said, I think what you're looking for is a really cool idea. The trouble comes down to specifying what exactly is meant by an incoming email "matching" an existing case or email thread. The devil is always in the details I suppose.