Hi.
We have issues with recognitions preventing wider deployment of Odoo features (v16 and soon v18) with Helpdesk and with some other functions.
The recognition of inbound email messages seems to hinge completely on the email header information? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
In a B2B environment there are a a multitude of systems for hangling all sorts of email communication and quite a few of them strip or edit the header info when the customer replies back. This leads to new tickets being created or customer getting an error message as a email reply and possibly (not confirmed yet) messages going missing.
This then leads to new conversations starting outside of Odoo process and wasted time figuring out whats going on and apologizing for delays and worst case, losing business.
I've seen a few posts touching on the subject but mostly it seems the issue has been considered as a 3rd party system feature that they should do something about.
Honestly this is much too important and common issue to just shrug off as someone elses problem. There should be more recognition levels for a redundant system.
The solutions I have been pondering:
- Add a unique helpdesk ticket number to the message subject
- Add a unique helpdesk ticket number to the message sent from odoo
- Add a record id (or what ever links a message to a chatter) to the end of the message sent from odoo.
- If inbound message is missing header (or what ever the current matching data is)
- Check is subject ticket number is present and a counter part already exists in DB
- If not, check if ticket number is present in reply message and a counter part already exists in DB
- Check if DB has any tasks names match the incoming reply. To lighten search, it could be limited to tasks that have the sender as a follower. Not sure what the subjet is, if you send message from contacts...
- Check if record id is present in message and a counter part exists in DB
- Else, proceed with normal odoo process for new emails.
Even this is propably not fool proof with editing subjects etc but I'm pretty sure it would add alot more robustness to message matching, that can be expected from a proper ticket system. `
Any thoughts?
Helpdesk has been around for a while and seems no one has picked up on this yet, so I'm not holding my breath for an official fix. So the next question would be if anyone has ideas on what stages/modules this should be customized to?
Yeah, I'm not saying it'll ever be perfect or fool proof, but using only header info is a bit half as*ing it...
Good point with the OCA. Have to take a look if the community Helpdesk is better. The enterprice version just isn't cutting it...
But the thing is that this issue is not only limited to Helpdesk. It also concerns all messaging from Odoo. With the centralized communiction and storing related info in the chatter being so essential part of what makes Odooo such a great tool, I think limiting the recognition to just one factor is a big handicap.
When you add the fact that Odoo messages trip spam filtters fairly easily, the number of communication interruptions start to threaten the useability.