Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment

Development
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Zawinski’s Law states “Every program attempts to expand until it can read email”.

I’ve been fighting against it for years, but I think the time has finally come… we’re going to enable the direct import of email from a magic email address to a customer’s Notes. The way it will work is, you’ll set up a mailbox xxx@yourdomain.com, and then every so often the system will check that mailbox, download any mail that’s there, work out which customer it’s related to - either from the “from” line, if the email is from the customer to that mailbox, or from the body, if the email has been sent to you and then forwarded to the mailbox, and create a note with the email’s body, with attachments if any.

This is how email works in https://freshdesk.com/ which is the system that we use for supporting you. If you need any kind of advanced helpdesk functionality for handling your box office customer service enquiries I thoroughly recommend it or a system like it - it will enable you to assign requests to people, set up types of query for analytics purposes, create SLA and groups and to on. We have no plans to replicate the full helpdesk functionality - but for simpler scenarios we can help by automating the creation of notes from emails.

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I really don’t want to spend the next few years building an email client / helpdesk tool though, so we will take a lot of persuading to implement the following features which I’m sure everyone will instantly ask for:

  • Notifications of newly created notes.
  • Being able to assign notes to other box office staff members for action
  • Being able to search your personal inbox of things to do
  • Sending customer service emails to customer from within Monad

If those sound like things you’re going to want, attach Freshdesk (or similar) to your main box office info account! I’ll happily show you want it looks like =)

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