Alliance has functionality to receive inbound emails. It is possible to configure the application to identify the customer if the email address of the sender is a known address in the profile database or if the email contains a structured API where there are login credentials as part of the API. This is documented in the following to PDF’s supplied with Alliance:
Email Listener Configuration Guide.pdf
Email Listener User Guide.pdf
In the event where the email is not a structured API, Alliance tries to find the sender’s email address anywhere in the database. This could be an address on the Customer, contact or even a labor activity row.
When a non-structured email is received, it is initially viewed in the Multi Channel List module. If the customer information is not populated and you are confident this is a known email address than there is likely more than one row returned in the search for the email address.
For example, the Customer has an email address on the company record but receiving mails from this address did not identify in the Multi Channel List. It was found the email address was also on a demand labor row which was not linked to the customer. Therefore, the application found there were two rows at least having the same address which it could not select which one to use.
This issue was resolved by finding the row in the demand_labor_done table in this case and changing that email address to something else to avoid duplicate rows found by the email address check.
Normal process is to populate the sender email address on a contact for the Customer.
