How to manage notifications for events to individual members rather than whole team? - azure-devops

One of our managers who is on the team for the project asked how to avoid getting so many emails. Basically, its just myself and another dev that really care anything about getting the email notifications when "something happens". Can I change the default notifications to use just individual email addresses, or do I need to make a new "subscription" in the project settings and then where do I use individual email addresses?

Can I change the default notifications to use just individual email
addresses
The default subscriptions cannot be modified, as Matt pointed out in the comment, you can choose to disable default subscriptions, then new subscription, set delivery to individual email addresses. The email gets sent to multiple custom email addresses, which are separated by semicolons.
But a more convenient way is to set Delivery settings.
Deliver to email address: notifications are delivered to a specific
email address.

Related

Azure DevOps project notifications settings not delivering to custom email address

I've made small changes in my project's notifications config:
In "Delivery settings" selected "Deliver to email address"
This email address is a distribution list that consists of several members
Now the notification configuration is like this:
However, notifications aren't delivered to this DL.
I'm wondering what may cause this misbehaving? Or I'm doing something wrong?..
There are different reasons for not receiving email notifications:
Email server might be down, unreachable or rejected authentication
Email was delivered to an unchecked folder
Subscription is disabled or opt-out
Event might not be matching with subscription key filter conditions
Subscription is defined to not send emails to the initiator of an event
Organization level do not deliver setting is impacting email delivery
The team or group level do not deliver setting is impacting email delivery
You're not a member of the group or team receiving the email
You're a member of an Azure Directory (AD) group and the subscription contains a #Me clause
You don't have permission to view the event details, which are included in the email
To check each and every condition and to troubleshoot your settings, consider the below link for walk through the procedure.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/notifications/troubleshoot-not-getting-email?view=azure-devops

Dynamics CRM Email management

I want to learn different ways how you guys handle incoming emails in Dynamics CRM.
How you make sure that everyone is responding to their emails?
Can we filter incoming emails to get the ones which are not yet
replied? On daily basis we are getting a lot of emails and we want
to have a filtered view where we can only see the emails which are
not yet replied yet.
How you deal with incoming emails which are sent to sales#
accounting# etc.
3A. How you distribute them among different users?
Assigning to them?
Forwarding to them?
3B. And how you make sure that they are replying to those emails?
I will appreciate if you I can learn from your experience on this subject
Use the existing Customer Service module which Microsoft has built for this purpose. Incoming emails create Case records, which are actionable items with associated statuses.
How you make sure that everyone is responding to their emails?
Set up workflows so that unassigned cases cause escalation of some sort (i.e. an email sent to a manager)
Can we filter incoming emails to get the ones which are not yet replied? On daily basis we are getting a lot of emails and we want to have a filtered view where we can only see the emails which are not yet replied yet.
Filter by Case status
How you deal with incoming emails which are sent to sales# accounting# etc.
- How you distribute them among different users?
You can set up routing logic so that cases are tagged with specific attributes, or assigned to specific users based on what address the originating email targeted.
Assigning to them?
This is out of the box case functionality
Forwarding to them?
Set up a workflow to send an email to the case owner or other user
And how you make sure that they are replying to those emails?
A simple option is to review the email history associated with the case. Automating this task is certainly possible but can get complicated.
You could add each email into a queue, and have users process emails out of the queue.
There is a setting to enable this on the entity configuration with the customisations area.
Emails when tracked or synchronised then appear within Dynamics within the queue.
Users then process the queue. This also caters for the scenario where emails do not need a reply - they can be removed from the queue. In this model, the emphasis switches from checking emails are replied to, to checking queues are cleared.
Reply email are linked back to the original email via the Parent Activity Id. So you could build a filter around this.
Create a queue for these to receive email.
The email address that you enter in the Incoming Email field receives all messages sent to the queue.
A) Users can pick items from the queue, a team leader can assign queue items to others, or use bespoke customisation or development to automatically route items.
B) As above.

How do I change the email address that Amazon SES feedback reports go to?

Background: I was handed the reins for our company's AWS account to implement a process to make sure our SES delivery report notifications can get acted on instead of just being filed away or deleted.
That said, the first hurdle is that the email address associated with our company's helpdesk keeps receiving all Amazon SES notifications for bounces, complaints and delivery failures. This creates a mess for our support staff in having to wade through these emails individually, and our ticketing system doesn't have the capability of auto-forwarding emails even though I can categorize them based on rules when they arrive.
I have read through all the knowledge base articles for SES notifications as well as ~380 forum topics relating to email notifications, but I didn't see an answer posted this question even though it had been asked a handful of times.
What we've done:
Set up a dedicated email inbox for these requests so we can then process them correctly (that we want to divert these messages to).
Created an SNS topic with the new email address as its endpoint and applied it to all categories, but the emails still kept going to support, so that clearly wasn't the solution.
Removed all hard-coded references to these emails from our software code, but we still get individual Amazon SES notifications to the helpdesk (~30 a day).
Simple idea, but AWS is pretty intimidating especially for our small company where no one has taken the time to learn through the ins and outs after first setting it up (fire and forget).
Edit for clarity, the emails I'm trying to redirect are "Delivery Status Notification (Failure/Delay)" and "Undeliverable:..."
Here's how i got this to work:
Under "AWS SNS"
Create an SNS Topic
Create a subscription to the topic that sends an email to your desired "catch address"
Confirm this subscription by clicking the link sent by AWS to this address
Under "SES Management - Identity Mangement"
Verify a domain or email address
At the domain/email address go to Notification and DISABLE Email Feedback Forwarding
Same place select your SNS topic for Bounces and Complaints
Under "SES Managment - Email Receiving"
Create a Rule set and then create a rule with the domain or email address above
Make the action the SNS rule above
When sending mail be sure that the From address is using the domain/email address above. All bounces and complaints should now end up in the catch address inbox. ALL OF THIS must be setup in the same region.
These notifications are configured either at a verified Domain level or at a verified email address level. This page has info on it. At the bottom, it talks about how you can confirgue to have messages sent to email or a SNS topic. You probably have a notification setup on your domain or the specific email address you are using.
You'll find all this in the SES section of the AWS Console under the Identity Management section. Make sure you check both the Domains area and the Email Addresses area.
You make the feedback address differ from the sender by setting the Return-Path header in your message (subject to a few other rules):
From the developer guide:
If you used the SMTP interface to send the message, then notifications go to the address specified in the MAIL FROM command.
If you used the SendEmail API operation to send the message, then the notifications are delivered according to the following rules:
If you specified the optional ReturnPath parameter in your call to the SendEmail API, then notifications go to that address.
Otherwise, notifications go to the address specified in the required Source parameter of SendEmail.
If you used the SendRawEmail API operation to send the message, then the notifications are delivered according to the following rules:
If you specified a Source parameter in your call to the SendRawEmail API, then notifications go to that address. This is true even if you specified a Return-Path header in the body of the email.
Otherwise, if you specified a Return-Path header in the raw message, then notifications go to that address.
Otherwise, notifications go to the address in the From header of the raw message.

How to avoid marked as spam by Gmail on sending mass email?

I created event registration web sites (you can imagine something like http://www.eventbrite.com/), which allow users to subscribe for event updates. When subscribed, we send mass emails (with the same content) to those users.
It was ok before, but recently I noticed that GMail always put the email into Spam folder.
As any texts would always go to Spam folder, I suspect that my domain was blacklisted by Gmail.
1) Is there a way to request google to put my domain into the whitelist?
2) Let's say it can't and I decide to register for new domain.
Is there a way to avoid the mass email to be marked as spam by Gmail? (may be something like what Facebook email notification do?)
Yes, don't send mass email :-) If you really want to avoid being considered a spammer, send out emails with less recipients, and don't swamp the mail server with them. Let's say, for example, you have thirty recipients for a given update. You can send out emails with one recipient every minute for a half hour.
Now the numbers may be different (and will of course depend on the success of your site) but the basic theory will stand up for quite a while.
As to how to get yourself whitelisted in GMail, that's really up to the recipient. They can usually do it by simply adding your email address to their contact list.
Keep in mind whitelisting there refers to individual GMail accounts, GMail itself does not whitelist IP addresses.
It does blacklist them if you misbehave but that generally means you get delivery rejects when trying to send. The fact that your messages are going in to the mail system and being delivered to spam folders indicates that this is an account-based thing, not a global GMail blacklisting of your IP/domain.
In any case, the place to report problems for GMail delivery problems is here.
As a school, we send out mass emails to our parents about events and issues. There's no way we have the time to spend sending out one email per minute. What we did was sign up with AOL as a business account, and we are allowed to do "bulk mailings" until they get multiple complaints. However, gmail clients usually have to list us as a valid sender or else those emails end up in spam folders. Works the same for clients using college alumni accounts from edu addresses. Gmail is the only one who regularly gives us this problem for our recipients on their email servers. We let parents know at orientation that they will have to specifically admit our emails via some setting on gmail.

How are SaaS/Mult-Tenancy apps implementing email notifications (sending and receving)?

Given multi-tenant application, How are vendors implementing email notifications from an email account setup and programming perspective:
Sending emails could come from a generic account: eg notifications#VendorName.com or noreply#VendorName.com, this seems reasonable considering reply addresses and lilnks can be contained within the email contents.
Receiving Emails: How would an application receive email, for instance; to generate support tickets or assign comments in an email to a project/task. I have seen ID's within the subject and some reply to addresses containing the account name eg: notifications#AccountName.VendorName.com
I realise one can programatically connect to a pop3 server and receive emails and look for the IDs with the subject, but is there a way of setting up and receiving email to a single pop3 account from multiple sub-host name email addresses (not sure on terminology there) eg: noreply#AccountName1.VendorName.com or noreply#AccountName2.VendorName.com and check the Account Name from the address? (similar to checking subdomains on a URL)
Any practices, experience, comments or sughestions?
(not sure its relevant, but using C# asp.net-mvc and services etc)
For sending notification emails, we have a notification send to address associated with each account and simply send from our domain to that address. Our from address is monitored and replies end up in the CSR work queue.
For inbound emails, we use FogBugz (from the makers of Stack Overflow) for case tracking. That accepts new cases via email (e.g. cases#mycompany.com). Tickets are auto-created from the email. My only complaint there is that the customer needs to check an obscure link for case updates (no "my cases" web portal, but maybe that will come out in an upcoming version of FogBugz).
We have a custom field in FogBugz to indicate the customer the ticket is from. We could theoretically write a plugin to FogBugz that auto-assigns that using the senders domain, but I guess the CSR's haven't complained loudly enough yet :-)
We (at muHive) are an inbound email/social conversations management product. If you are looking at a handling inbound email or social media conversations from customers, we have an impressive toolset.
For our own outbound needs, the simplest way is to use an Email sending API. Don't bother with SMTP sending by yourself. We use Amazon SES and have also tried Sendgrid which gave us additional benefits like delivery status and email parsing.
There are two ways in which you can handle multiple accounts to a catch all email address. If your target system can differentiate between different customers and assign tasks to the correct representatives based on either the content/sender, ask all your customers to send an email to support#company.com.
As you rightly said, you could also create *accountName_support#company.com* email addresses and use different accounts on whatever CRM/Support solution use to manage these emails.
Another approach is to have your customers send you an email to support#company.com and you use a rule based system (like muHive) to forward these mails to the appropriate account executives based on the customer/account who sent the mail.