Plus Addressing
What is Plus Addressing?
Plus Addressing is an industry-defined feature which allows the automatic addition of information into an email address when a mail is being composed. Systems can then subsequently use this additional information if they know to look for it within the email addresses, while still ensuring that the mail gets to its intended recipients. In Enate, we make use of this feature of Plus Addressing to automatically add the reference number of a Case, Action or Ticket (e.g. '101203-T') to the email address of any emails that we know should be being subsequently shared with that work item.
For example, if an Agent is emailing out a reply to a query that has arrived into the mailbox 'info@enate.io', upon sending the email Enate will auto-populate the From email address with a plus sign (+) followed by the reference number of the work item as a tag, so the From email address will look something like this: 'info+123-T@enate.io'. The underlying structure of this is: [email address][+EnateRef][@email domain].
Similarly, if they are including other Enate email addresses where we could share the mail with a known existing / new work item, the system will add those other work item references to the outgoing mail. An example of two email addresses which have been adjusted in this way can be seen below:
Why is Plus Addressing Useful in Enate?
Adding this extra information into the email addresses of mails relating to work items allows us to run an additional layer of processing logic for incoming emails. The logic is fairly simple: If a work item reference number if recognized as part of any of an email's target mail addresses, that mail is shared with that work item.
Doing this massively reduces the chances of creating unnecessary work items when sending emails back and forth - particularly useful when there are multiple separate work items being actioned across multiple separate teams in Enate to deal with larger queries.
Check out this article showing how Working Between Teams is improved by this approach.
Note: Some additional details to this:
If an agent writing an outgoing mail includes an email address which Enate knows is linked to an Enate mailbox, when they click to send the mail Enate will propose a pop-up to the agent showing them: - Any linked work items which were created as a result of a mail into that same mailbox - An option to create a NEW (automatically linked) work item.
Once the agent has chosen the existing / new linked work item(s) to share that mail with, the mail will be shared with two work items, the email will be sent out to any external / non-Enate using parties, and the work item references of THIS work item and the ones it is behind shared with will be added into the relevant mail addresses of the mail.
This ensures that on ALL subsequent email exchanges - coming either from internal parties or external / non-Enate parties, those work item 'tags' in the addresses route the mails to share with the required work items. Further things to note...
If an incoming mail is replying to a closed work item, the system will create new one.
Live and test items cannot be addressed in a single mail.
One further note:
When an email is being sent out from Enate which includes an Enate-linked mailbox in the To / Cc addressees and the specific work item reference number it would be appended to, Enate will perform this appending immediately before the mail is sent out. In order to avoid a duplicate appending when that email ultimately arrives back in to that Enate mailbox, Enate knows to recognize any incoming mails which have a ‘from’ address which has been used in the config settings of a Ticket / Case or Action, and will NOT process that mail into Enate for that ticket.
A knock-on impact of this can be this: if as a configurer you are testing incoming emails, and you manually send mails to Enate from an account which has been used in the config settings of a Ticket / Case or Action (including retired versions), Enate will NOT append the email to a work item, nor will it create a new work item. As such, please pay close attention to the test mail accounts you select to send test emails into Enate from.
How do I enable Plus Addressing?
Activities required outside of Enate
You firstly need to enable Plus Addressing in whichever email system you are using.
This article takes you through how to enable Plus Addressing in Microsoft 365:
This article shows you how to enable Plus Addressing in Gmail:
Enate Setting for Plus Addressing
Once the above email server settings have been confirmed as being set to support Plus Addressing, you need to enable Plus Addressing in Enate.
To do this, go to Builder > System-Settings > General Settings, navigate down to the 'Work Item Plus Addressing' section and switch the toggle on.
Work items will now be matched using Plus Addressing.
Note that Plus Addressing is set to OFF by default.
If Plus Addressing in NOT switched on, work items will be matched using standard fall-back email processing rules (i.e. those not used in Plus Addressing).
Further information about how Enate matches emails
See here for more information about how Enate processes incoming emails:
Changes to Email Route Configurations - Actions you need to take
1. Ensure that all Email Routes which you have defined which use * as a wildcard email for the Route Rule email address have been modified to remove the wildcard and replace it with a legitimate email address.
2. Configure at least one Email route for every email address which includes an alias in Enate. We can provide a report on enate configured email addresses.
3. Optional but strongly advised – if you wish to make use of the Internal Team Communications features for improving working between Teams, you will need to ensure that your Email Administrator has turned on 'Plus Addressing' for your email server. Helpful Microsoft article for this - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipients-in-exchange-online/plus-addressing-in-exchange-online.
Note: This also needs to be enabled on your email gateway e.g. Mimecast.
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