RELATED IDEAS
Log timeline activity on conversation subject being manually changed
My team spotted a couple of cases where the subject of a message did not align with the conversation subject; it turns out someone on the team manually edited the conversation subject.
To make cases like this clearer, it would be useful to have a "Conversation Subject updated by <teammate>" activity printed in the conversation timeline to clearly indicate who edited the subject, and when.
My vote goes into finding a way for Front to identify subject header changes even when the references tied to the changed subject email point to an 'original email subject'.
Below is the issue that I'm describing and what are the identifiers being used to combine threads. If more can be done to identify when a thread has a subject change, who did it, and when they did it. It will help users identify the change and action the emails accordingly:
To clarify on what's going on here, I think it's necessary to give some insight into how we thread messages. At a high level, every message contains a header that holds unique identifiers for the email provider to parse. The email client (Front) uses these identifiers to figure out what to do with that message, for example, which conversation to thread the message to. Furthermore, every email also contains a unique message-id, which is automatically included in the references of the email header. When we receive an email, we loop in the references and message-id to see if we can find any similar conversations. If we do, we'll thread the incoming message to the existing conversation we’ve just found. If no message is found, then we create a new conversation.
When they took a look at the message you provided (msg_2k613rf0), they confirmed that it contains both a references and in-reply-to header that points to other messages on that thread. This indicates to Front that these messages are being sent in direct reply to other messages in this thread. We usually see this when senders reuse the same emails but change a few things, like the subject and text in the message body. Because they are reusing the same email, the email does not drop its references. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do to fix this, as this is coming from the sender's side of things.
Hello,
I hope there is an update soon that can help to identify when the email subject changes and as you mention to be able to see by who (<teammate>).
It seems that the issue is that Front will always combine emails if the 'back end email data' remains the same
it's hard to catch, we had an automated rule that would try to catch when a potential subject change happens, but it catches too many. So the tag gets ignored
I believe it should be possible to create a rule and add a tag, by using a dynamic variable to know when an original email subject change, I have been testing with my personal email. Please see attachments.
It would be greatly appreciated if you could help us with any comments or feedback.
We keep tuned.