Sunday, January 13, 2019

Updates to 3mail (and Chat History)

Amy Shelton 7:02 PM

We made some updates to LibraryH3lp's email module, 3mail. For those of you not already familiar with 3mail, the 3mail module transforms a queue in your LibraryH3lp account in to a mailbox shared by all operators staffing the queue. So if you don't already have an email solution for customer support or are looking for something different, 3mail might be just the thing! 3mail is included in all subscriptions at no extra charge.

Plus we've make a small change to the search area in the Chat History page which we'll cover first and then dive into 3mail updates.

Update 2019/01/26: These updates are now available on all servers. To ensure you have the latest, hold down the SHIFT key while clicking Reload/Refresh in your browser at the login screen.

Highlight Chat Search Box in Chat History

Functionally speaking, nothing has changed with chat history searches. All the dreamy search goodness is still at your fingertips. What we've done is to rework the presentation a tad to draw more attention to the search controls at the top of the Chat History page, which is available in either the admin dashboard or webclient for staffing.

Updated look for Chat History search controls

Support for local email aliases in 3mail

3mail mailboxes have email addresses that look generally like QUEUE-NAME@chat.libraryh3lp.com (taking our main server domain as an example). With local email aliases, the email address used to send and receive email doesn't actually change but your guests will see the local email address (Reply To) instead of your 3mail address when they receive email. As an example: reference@mycollege.edu instead of mycollege-reference@chat.libraryh3lp.com.

You can set the local email alias for your mailbox in the queues management page of the admin dashboard. Click the queue with which your mailbox is associated and set or update the email address.

Transfer emails between any mailbox

Previously operators could only transfer emails between mailboxes to which they were assigned. But now operators can transfer emails to any mailbox in a LibraryH3lp subscription, much the same way an operator can transfer a chat to any queue in a LibraryH3lp subscription.

This feature should especially come in handy for folks with multiple departments or groups within a single LibraryH3lp subscription. If an email comes into the wrong mailbox, simply move it to the correct one. Easy peasy.

Delete Emails Forever

Emails in either the Trash or in Spam can be deleted forever. Use with caution. We cannot retrieve any emails you might accidentally banish to the netherworld. They are really and truly gone forever.

Miscellaneous 3mail Bug Fixes

We now ignore the timestamp on drafts when sorting emails by date. Instead, only the time of the last message in an email thread is considered. This prevents emails with drafts from falsely floating to the top of your email listing.
Previously, operators could only reply to the last message in an email thread. Now they can reply directly to any message in the thread.
The unread indicator for Inbox, etc now reflects the total number of unread email threads and not the number of individual messages. Suppose for example that you've emailed a guest and that guest replied twice and you have not yet read either reply. Such a situation now counts as 1 in the unread badge for your Inbox instead of 2.