Email integration (two-way)

Your system allows you to communicate with your customers by rich template based email. The system can be configured so that when the customer replies, the contents of their reply along with any attached files are imported back into the original case and the responsible caseworker will be alerted of the new information.

Any other emails received can automatically generate new cases, retaining the original email and its attachments as documents linked to the new case. This provides a convenient mechanism for your staff or document management systems to turn any email received into a case: simply forward it to the monitored mailbox.

How it works

Outbound mail

When sending email, you will normally wish to ensure that mail appears to originate from your own email addresses and brand domain(s). As a cloud-hosted system, we use Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to send mail. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), built on Amazon’s reliable and scalable infrastructure is a mails service that can send mail on behalf of your domain.  SES utilises a technology called DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to ensure the mail we send is treated as legitimate by the recipient's email provider, and isn't treated as spam.

For each address or domain that you wish to send mail from:

• We will also provide you with a set of DKIM key values to be added to your domain's DNS records in order that recipients of mail can utilise DKIM to verify the mail is legitimate.

Below are some of the features of SES that maximize deliverability and dependability for all of our senders:

• Amazon SES uses content-filtering technologies to help detect and block messages containing viruses or malware before they can be sent.
• Amazon SES supports authentication mechanisms such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
• Amazon SES maintains complaint feedback loops with major ISPs. Complaint feedback loops indicate which emails a recipient marked as spam.
• Amazon SES uses a variety of techniques to measure the quality of each user’s sending. These mechanisms help identify and disable attempts to use Amazon SES for unsolicited mail, and detect other sending patterns that would harm. Amazon SES’s reputation with ISPs, mailbox providers, and anti-spam services.

If you prefer, you can provide an SMTP relay that iCasework can connect to in order to generate and send email using your own mailservers. In order to connect to your SMTP server, please provide your SMTP server name and username and password of an account that has been granted send as permissions in order for iCasework to send on behalf of the designated mailboxes. You may also need to whitelist our sending server IP's (NAT Gateway IP's), this will be provided by a consultant. 

Inbound mail

In order to allow replies to be attached to existing cases, and so that new email can be used to generate new cases, your system can monitor up to twelve mailboxes per system area. Emails generated from the system are sent with the monitored mailbox as a "reply-to" address, which is then used by the recipient instead of the displayed "from" address when sending replies. We recommend that you set up the reply-to address as a mailbox on your own infrastructure (e.g. Microsoft Exchange etc) so that your own domain is used for replies.

However, as it is a cloud-hosted system most corporate firewalls and security policies will not allow us to connect directly to your Exchange server over IMAP, we recommend you ensure that this mailbox redirects mail to an address that is provided to you by your consultant, which will be the monitored address.

You must ensure that the redirection keeps the SMTP headers of the mail intact so that the sender's address is not altered, and you should use a TLS connection. Contact your consultant for further help with configuring inbound mail.