You may be comfortable keeping your personal inbox a pigsty, but when you choose to deploy a helpdesk to share your organization’s mail, it’s best to have things in a logical order. Picking Cerb4 is definitely a step in the right direction as it can automatically filter and sort your mail exactly how you want it, unfortunately it’s not going to work without a little prep work on your part. To get things up and running, you need to configure three levels of filters that all incoming mail must pass through. By the time your mail gets through the gauntlet, unwanted mail will be blocked and the rest will be dropped off into groups & buckets (and assigned to workers if you wish).

Filter #1: Pre-Parser

You can think of the first gate as a doorman, stopping mail without the proper credentials from entering into the Helpdesk. Mail that fits your criteria does not become a ticket, is not written to the database, and is effectively removed from Cerb4’s jurisdiction. The most obvious use for the pre-parser is as a “spam catcher”. When used properly you can blackhole (or drop) spam from being converted into a ticket, saving you the trouble of reporting it later on. To configure the pre-parser click ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Pre-Parser’ tab, and then fill in the criteria.

Filter #2: Mail Parser

After you filtered out as much unwanted mail as possible, now you move on to the legitimate mail that is converted into actual tickets. The second gate, “mail parser”, is for routing mail into different group inboxes based on the recipient’s address — use patterns to match a specific address from your Helpdesk, and move mail into groups of your choosing. A priority is given to each routing rule to determine which one fires first in case a sender matches multiple times. Any leftover mail will be placed in the default Dispatch group, but you can change that as well. Click the ‘Mail Parser’ tab to start adding routing rules.

Filter #3: Inbox Filtering

At this point your mail is in the Helpdesk in the form of tickets, and has been pushed into groups waiting to be handled as each group sees fit. With “inbox filtering”, you can do just about anything you want to these tickets: move them to a bucket, assign them to a worker, etc. To configure the inbox filters click ‘group setup’, a group name, and the ‘Inbox Filtering’ tab, then fill in the same basic criteria from the pre-parser, and choose a couple of actions.

Over time as you get more mail look out for patterns and trends, and you can simply add new filters to constantly keep your incoming mail organized. If three filters are too much to configure up front, remember all of these filtering tools are optional; if you want to create a “spam catcher” with the pre-parser, and let the Helpdesk dump all your mail into the default Dispatch group, you can, if you want to divvy up all your mail into different groups, but let your workers move it by hand to different buckets, you can do that too.

Cerb4 can be a great way to filter and sort your mail automatically, just don’t expect it do it all for you out of the box.

-joegeck@wgm