Automatically filter and sort your mail in 3 steps
From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki
Cerb4 can be a great way to filter and sort your mail automatically, just don’t expect it to work out of the box. To get things up and running, you need to configure three levels of filters that all incoming mail must pass through. By the time your mail gets through the gauntlet, unwanted mail will be blocked and the rest will be dropped off into groups & buckets. Thankfully each one shares a very similar interface, with similar criteria, so everything is fairly intuitive.
If three filters are too much to configure up front, remember all of these filtering tools are optional. But over time look for patterns and trends you can base new filters around to consistently keep your mail organized on its own. In the meantime if you want to just use the pre-parser to drop spam, and let the Helpdesk dump all your mail into the default Dispatch group -- you can. If you want to add mail routing to divvy up all your mail into different groups, and then let your workers sift through tickets by hand -- you can do that too.
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[edit] Filter #1: Mail Filtering (aka Pre-Parser)
You can think of the first gate as a doorman, stopping mail without the proper credentials from entering into the Helpdesk. Mail that fits your criteria does not become a ticket, is not written to the database, and is effectively removed from Cerb4’s jurisdiction. The most obvious use for the pre-parser is as a “spam catcher”, when used properly you can blackhole (or drop) spam from being converted into a ticket, saving you the trouble of reporting it later. Other actions include redirecting the message to another e-mail address outside the scope of Cerb4, or bouncing the message back to the sender.
Note this section can be expanded via plugin. An example plugin was documented on the wiki, which allows you to copy the contents of e-mail headers into custom fields.
- To configure the pre-parser click ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Mail Filtering’ tab.
[edit] Filter #2: Mail Routing (aka Mail Parser)
After you filtered out as much unwanted mail as possible, now you move on to the legitimate mail that is converted into actual tickets. The second gate, “mail parser”, is for routing mail into different group inboxes of your choosing. Any leftover mail will be placed in the default group listed (set at Dispatch on new installs). Just remember if you have a couple of rules and the first rule successfully routes the ticket, any other rules in this section will not get a chance to run.
- Click over to the 'Mail Routing' tab to start distributing your mail. You can also set global ticket custom fields at this stage.
[edit] Filter #3: Inbox Routing (aka Group Inbox Filtering)
At this point your mail is in the Helpdesk in the form of tickets, has been pushed into groups, and they are waiting to be handled as each team sees fit. With "inbox filtering”, you can do just about anything you want to these tickets: move them to a bucket, assign them to a worker, or set even more custom fields (global and/or group).
- To configure the inbox filters click ‘group setup’, a group name, and the ‘Inbox Routing’ tab. Decide now what your group workflow will be.
[edit] More Information
Even though the basic "3 gate" idea is fairly simple to understand, creating efficient rule flow can be complicated and is something that users will need to educate themselves on separately. For instance it's very important to "stack" rules when you have multiple teams in your company or if you need to create different workflows for similar tickets, e.g. the Sales group takes actions A, B, and C on tickets from sales@example.com but Support takes care of everyone else at *@example.com with actions D, E, and F. You really should organize your rule structure to accommodate for such situations, in which case the following tutorials will help.
Adapted from a Cerb4 blog post and now updated to reflect 4.3 interface changes.
