Odoo Dashboard for Unrouted Received Reply Emails

Odoo’s catch-all primary purpose is to route and manage incoming emails when a sender emails your domain. However, in cases where the sender uses a non-existent mailbox or alias, the catchall will try to use Odoo’s special email header, which is only visible to servers and other email software, to determine where to route an email reply. In other words, this header lets Odoo know which record the sender is replying to (e.g. Customer sent reply to Sales Order S00235). The absence of this header will result in an email bounce back, and you will have communication attempts missing from the chatter of the record. The sender will also receive this email bounce back, notifying them that their email was not successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

Let’s review some of the reasons a header could be missing:

1. The sender clicked ‘Forward’ and manually edited the email to make it look like a reply.
2. The sender crafted their reply by copy-paste, so their ‘reply’ is actually a new message.
3. The sender is using an email software that is not standard-compliant and does not include original headers in its replies.
4. The sender has a security system that intercepts emails and strips out unknown or non-standard headers. Some misconfigured spam control systems can also do this.
5. The sender’s email software is a forwarder that forwards the email body but not the email header.

It’s impossible to try to resolve issues that are not related to your configuration or email server. So, Steersman has created a solution that will collect these unrouted replies into one place and enable you to determine where they should be directed.

Unrouted Emails Dashboard

After installing the app, Steersman Mail, a new menu option called Unrouted Emails will appear in the Discuss app. By default, you will see any emails missing routing on incoming email replies.

This is where the catchall will display all its bounced emails in a list view, ready for you to begin sifting through and re-routing them into their appropriate locations.

If you click on one of the email lines, the details of this record will be displayed. This will allow you to gather the context of the message, so that you can determine where this reply should be routed to.

e.g., related contact tied to this email, the time it was sent, body of the message

By clicking EDIT, you can now set the Related Document field. This field allows you to choose the type of record set you will be filtering in. In this case, I know I am looking for a specific sales order.

Once the related document is selected, you will be able to choose which specific document of this type the message was for. In my case, it is S00009.

Once you have selected the record, click SAVE.

Once the specific document has been selected, Odoo will display a new smart button that takes you to the linked record, called PREVIEW. Use this to verify that this is the document you want to link.

When you are done, you can use the breadcrumbs to go back to the unrouted email.

Then on the record, click APPLY to save your changes.

Here, you will see that the email reply that you routed is now sitting in the chatter of the record. Odoo will place the reply in the chronological order of the chatter history.

You will then be able to pick up the conversation, and the contact of the record will be able to reply back and forth.

Check out More Related Steersman Features

• Odoo email carbon copy to multiple contacts per document or model