PBJ Helpdesk 2.13.0 — spam housekeeping, an all-mailboxes view, and shared email addresses
Three things from the mail and ticket-intake list: an Empty button for the spam pile that tells you what it kept, an “All mailboxes” view, and a prompt that asks which customer a shared email address belongs to.
Empty the spam pile — and find out what was kept
The Bin has had an “empty it now” button for a while. The spam pile now has one too, in the same place, appearing only while you are actually looking at that pile.
The more useful half of this change is what both buttons now tell you. Email that belongs to a ticket is never deleted — that protection has always been there, and it means an “empty” can legitimately leave messages behind. Until now all you got back was a number, which could not tell you whether nothing was protected or whether four things were and nobody mentioned it. Both buttons now say how many were deleted and how many were kept, and why. The two numbers always add up to what the pile badge showed you.
“All mailboxes”
If you have more than one mailbox connected, there is a new entry at the top of the mail rail. Pick it and you see every mailbox’s mail in one list, with the Inbox / Tickets / Filed / Spam / Bin counts added up to match.
It only appears when you genuinely have more than one mailbox — on a single-mailbox site it would just be the same list wearing a second name. And you cannot send from it: click Compose while it is selected and the help desk picks your first real mailbox and tells you so. Reading across every mailbox is a sensible question; sending from every mailbox is not.
When one address belongs to more than one customer
Some email addresses genuinely belong to several people. A shared office@. A couple on one mailbox. Somebody who works at two businesses. PBJ CRM 1.20.0 made that legal in the contact book, and PBJ Helpdesk 2.12.0 taught the help desk to notice it. This release is the part that acts on it.
When a ticket’s requester address could mean more than one customer, a line appears near the top of the ticket: “More than one customer uses this address. Which one is this ticket for?” — with the candidates as buttons. Anything you have taught it before is listed first and marked (remembered).
Two things are worth saying plainly about that prompt.
It only ever asks. Nothing is written until you click a name. A ticket keeps whatever customer it already had, so tickets filed correctly months ago are completely unaffected, and ignoring the prompt leaves you with exactly the behaviour you had before.
It only offers what you are allowed to see. If a candidate is a record your account cannot open, it is counted — so the sentence stays true — but it is never named. The prompt cannot be used to find out who else is in the contact book.
Underneath, the help desk can now remember more than one customer for the same address. Teaching it a second one adds to what it knows instead of quietly overwriting the first, which is what used to happen.
Upgrading
There is a small database change (schema version 9). It changes the shape of one index and nothing else: no message, ticket or contact is deleted, updated or re-filed, and no ticket changes hands. If your host does not permit the change, the help desk carries on working exactly as it did on 2.12.0 — one remembered customer per address — rather than showing you errors.
PBJ Helpdesk is a module of PBJ CRM and needs PBJ CRM 1.10.0 or newer. Shared addresses in the contact book need PBJ CRM 1.20.0 or newer; on an older CRM everything else in this release still works, unchanged.