I’m sure everyone who uses e-mail by now, has come to expect the standard “reply to all” button. This may come as a surprise to you but Cerb4 does not have one; at least in the traditional sense. Cerb4 is much more than two people e-mailing each other back and forth, it’s primary purpose is to function as an organization’s helpdesk. And from a customer support standpoint it’s not always desirable to reply back to everyone the message was originally addressed to with the click of a button.

By default Cerb4 only replies back to the sender. Anyone else the e-mail was addressed to originally has to be manually added to the ticket requesters list.

And there’s a good reason for that. You see, the kind of business operations that normally use Cerb4 want to carefully choose additional requesters, or which addresses receive their outgoing messages. Maybe the reply is only meant for whoever wrote the e-mail. Maybe it should go back to the other person in the To: address and not back to the sender at all. Or maybe… you get the idea. There’s any number of reasons really. Perhaps your response is for the boss’s eyes only, contains confidential information, is handled by a different department — use your imagination.

To satisfy this choosing of recipients on a per conversation, or per ticket basis, we decided to forgo the “reply to all” button. Instead we have something more along the lines of a “reply to some” button.

So the next time you want to write back to more than one address don’t look for reply to all, you’re not going to find it. Look for the ‘(change)’ link and in the Ticket Requesters pop-up window you can add or remove addresses from receiving this reply.

Once you change the list of requesters they are saved as e-mail recipients for the remainder of the conversation. That is, you only need to change requesters once per ticket — assuming you want those addresses to continue receiving replies. This is done for your convenience but you can always modify the list again for any future replies. And remember these requesters are only applied to this specific ticket; the next ticket goes back to the usual reply to sender only convention.

So that’s it for Part 1, but there’s a lot more to talk about. Next time we will conclude the series by showing you how to configure Cerb4 to automatically reply to all by default.

-joegeck@wgm