Welcome to the conclusion of learning to live without a “reply to all” button. Part 1 in this two-part series explained how you can change requesters on a per ticket basis. If you recall my argument for excluding a “reply to all” button was that Cerb4 users generally want to reply to some but not everyone the message was sent to. Today I want to show you the dark side of manually selecting your requesters. Take a look at this screenshot from last time:

Notice anything that looks like it’d be a pain to do after a while? No … let me clarify a bit. Would you agree that adding requesters takes a little bit of extra effort? … Ah-ha!

See the To: header in the picture? The original message I’m replying to was not only sent to our Helpdesk address but also another address, Watcher. To make sure Watcher gets the reply I had to copy & paste his address in the requesters window. Notice how I had to go out of my way to simply include everyone addressed in the original message. And the same goes for someone I want to add from the Cc: header.

So let me summarize what I know 1/2 of you are thinking right about now…

Uh yeah that’s going to get old real fast. Is it that unreasonable to assume every person sent a copy of the original e-mail wants a reply? That’s what our organization would do. Do you honestly expect us to manually add all the To/Cc addresses on every new ticket!

I agree that’s a lot of extra clicks and copy pasting to do all the time. In our defense you have to realize reply to all is one of those features where our users fall into three camps:

1. It should always send my replies to every requester addressed in the e-mail.
2. It does that? I only want one requester getting this reply and that’s the address it was originally sent from. How can I turn it off.
3. I only want to reply to some of the requesters, but there’s a few addresses I never want to send mail to. And I don’t want to have to remember to drop them.

To satisfy all three camps there’s only one thing we could really do. Make it an option! By default reply to all is turned off. That means you’ll have to manually add every other address to the ticket requesters for them to start receiving replies. To enable a proper reply to all to happen automatically you need to toggle it on in the Incoming Mail Preferences. Click ‘helpdesk setup’, then the ‘Mail Servers’ tab and checkmark ‘Reply to All’.

For those astute readers I’m sure you’ve noticed the ‘Always Exclude These Recipients’ box. Remember user camp #3? Meeting that customer need is the whole reason we required something more advanced than a “reply to all” button in the first place.

When a Cerb4 user decides there’s a few addresses I never want to send mail to, they can reply to everyone except those addresses automatically. No need to drop requesters from the list first!

And what about those special situations when you need to include a permanently blocked requester temporarily. You can add them back using the standard ‘(change)’ ticket requesters window. They’ll be excluded again in the next ticket.

So that just about wraps things up! You can reply to all, to one, to some or no one at all. The choice is yours, hopefully you just know where to find it now.

-joegeck@wgm