A customer's email has arrived at NeetoDesk. Customer identification source decides which header From or Reply-To should be used to decide what the email of the customer is. Note that Customer identification source is used only for the inbound emails. It means emails that are arriving at NeetoDesk. Customer identification source doesn't have any say about the outbound emails from NeetoDesk.
Let's understand what exactly is going on here.
A customer emails a question to support email and NeetoDesk knows if an agent replies where to email the reply. The reply should go to the from where the email came. This is straightforward and simple.
Now let's imagine a case where the customer sends and email to an agent directly. May be somehow the customer knows agent's email. This typically happens when a company representatives go to attend conferences. There they introduce themselves and they provide the contact email.
Let' say one of the prospective customers, Charlie ([email protected]) sends an email to [email protected]. Charlie sent the email because after the conference he tried out the software and something is not working. Now what would Oliver do. Oliver will forward that email to [email protected] so that Charlie can get a reply.
Notice who sent the email to support - it was Oliver. So now when an agent replies to the ticket who will get the reply. Oliver will get the reply and not Charlie.
What we want to happen is that email replies should go to Charlie.
The way email works it provides us two pieces of information. One is from which we know what it does. It carries the email of the person who sent the email.
Email also carries an additional thing called Reply-To. When Oliver forwards email to support then that email will have from of Oliver but that email's Reply-to will have Charlie's email.
When the agent posts the answer then if NeetoDesk can send email to the person mentioned at Reply-To instead of From then the problem is solved.
That's exactly what Customer identification source does. If it's set to From then the agent's reply will go to the person who sent the email. If it's set to Reply-To then the agent's reply will go to the person mentioned in Reply-To of the email.
In most cases, customers email your connected support address directly. However, there are situations where you might send emails yourself, such as when a WordPress site sends emails upon form submission. In such cases, the submitter’s email can only be used as the Reply-To address.
This causes NeetoDesk to mistakenly identify your email address (the sender) as the customer’s email, which is not the desired behavior.