When a customer replies to an email from your desk, DevStride has to decide which ticket the reply belongs to. It does this the same way every time, with a fixed list of checks. This page sets out what your customers receive, the checks in the order they run, and what to look at when a reply opens a new ticket instead of joining the old one.
Every email DevStride sends about a ticket (a public reply, a status change, the "we received your request" acknowledgement) carries three things that let the answer find its way back:
reply+…@in.devstride.com. Hitting Reply sends the answer to it.Re: Printer is offline [I123-ab34cd56].The reply address and the tag are both signed by DevStride, so neither can be made up for a ticket by someone who has never received one of your emails.
For each inbound message, DevStride works down this list and stops at the first check that matches. If none matches, the message opens a new ticket.
| Order | What is matched | Who may send it | Typical case |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reply address. Any recipient (To or Cc) is a valid reply address for a ticket in your organization. | Anyone holding the address. | The customer hits Reply and the mail goes to the Reply-To address. |
| 2 | Email headers. The message's In-Reply-To or References name an email the desk sent, or one the desk already filed on a ticket. | The ticket's requester, or an active member of your organization whose mail passed DMARC and who is replying to mail the desk received. | A mail program that replies to the From address instead of the Reply-To address. A reply-all thread that includes the desk. |
| 3 | Subject tag. The subject contains a valid [I123-xxxxxxxx] tag. | Anyone whose subject carries the tag. | Outlook and Exchange, which often rewrite the headers. |
| 4 | Staff forward as attachment. A forward from a staff member whose attached original belongs to an existing ticket. | An active member whose mail passed DMARC, forwarding the original of that ticket's own requester. | A colleague forwards a customer's reply into the desk. |
| 5 | Nothing matched. | Anyone. | A new request. It becomes a new ticket. |
Replies typed into the customer portal do not go through these checks: the portal already knows which ticket and which customer, so the reply goes straight onto that ticket.
Header matching (check 2) is the only check that looks at who sent the message, because email headers travel inside the message and anyone can copy them. It accepts:
Anyone else, including a colleague of the customer who was copied on the thread, does not thread by headers. Their message continues down the list: if it also carries the reply address or the subject tag it still joins the ticket (see below), otherwise it opens a ticket of its own.
Checks 1 and 3 don't ask who is writing. They ask whether the message holds the key. Whoever has the reply address or the subject tag for a ticket can add to it. That has two practical effects:
Treat the reply address like a password for that one ticket: if a customer forwards your email to someone, that person can reply to it and be added to the ticket.
Keep the tag when you or a customer change a subject line. The tag is what carries a reply back to its ticket when the mail program has rewritten the headers and replied to the From address instead of the Reply-To address, which Outlook does often. If the tag is removed and the headers don't match either, the reply opens a new ticket.
Changing the words before the tag is fine. Replying turns Printer is offline [I123-ab34cd56] into Re: Printer is offline [I123-ab34cd56], and that still matches.
When a colleague forwards a customer's email to the channel address, DevStride can add it to the customer's existing ticket (check 4) only when all of these hold:
Otherwise the forward opens a new ticket. The rules for who is credited with a forward, and what is published to the customer, are on Email Channels.
Work through these in order:
[I123-xxxxxxxx] tag, the tag was removed or the mail program rewrote it.Reports
Six built-in support reports (volume, first response, time to resolution, SLA attainment, agent activity, first-contact resolution) with date range, bucketing, grouping, an SLA-only toggle, and CSV export.
Overview
Templates capture a reusable tree of workstreams, work items, and sub-items so you can stamp out the same shape of work again and again — with the right owners, dates, and fields already in place.