Email2AT – Email Parser for Autotask

hi everybody chris tim here from Sondela consulting uh we're msp consultants specializing in helping msps get the best out of all the tasks with me today i have my good friend travis austin from msp integrations and he's going to talk to us today um all about the um email to at product so hey travis how are you doing i'm great chris it's so good to be here thanks for having me on yeah it's great great to see you again i know we've spoken many times in the past so it was good to get you on and uh um you know get your demoing in the product so i think we met when you worked for work for auto task back in the day like well you and i have known each other off and on for years and years and years so it's fun to do this with you absolutely yeah i mean i i worked back uh in all the tasks back in around 2011 but i think we knew each other long before that as well um probably when i had my msp business um you know way back in the day so yeah um yeah we've known each other for a very long time so um and uh and i actually remember weirdly i'm i'm gonna actually put you on the spot i'm sure people find this on on youtube but i actually remember a video that you did um in starbucks and you were kind of sitting with your feet on the table and talking all about all the tasks and stuff so um i remember it's probably still on youtube actually somewhere probably out there somewhere yeah so if we can find it i'll link to it on the um on notice on this video so um do you want to just tell us a little bit about who you are and you know why you started uh the company and what it does yeah so i've been in the msp space probably since the early 2000s i started a brake fix company we moved and demanded services and we adopted auto tasks probably in about 2008 or so and in my msp and at that time there was no way to get emails into auto task and what i found was that my customers were emailing me or other people in my msp reporting a problem like a printer's broken or something like that and it never made it into auto task because no one created a ticket someone would fix the issue and then we never had any visibility into it so when we first adopted auto tasks that's what kind of kind of what we found i knew a little bit about api programming at the time and i wrote just a really simple way for my customers to email us and create a ticket and auto task from that email and that really helped our team to stay on top of things and make sure that all the requests we got were in auto task so i built this thing i was asked to share about it at an auto task community event so i came and i said hey guys look what you could do with the api look what you can write look at the the things you can do to make your business better and i walked out of that session with a whole stack of business cards and people said we don't want to write anything to the api but what you've done looks really cool can we buy it from you and so that's kind of how msp integration started i had an msp i had a need so i filled it and then a whole bunch of other people thought it was pretty cool so fast forward about 10 years i sold my msp in the late probably about 2018 found another buyer locally here who's a great guy and he's done really good things with my customers and you know it's just a really good transition out and so for the last two and a half years i've been working full-time on msp integrations really making the product everything i wish it always was and we had a good product before i'm really proud of what we have now we can do some really really creative things that hopefully we can get into in a little bit but we even have customers who are finding like hey i can't do work with the autotask workflow engine for example so they'll even have the autotest workflow and create an email to email email to at and have email to at go into autotask and do what they wish the autotest workflow engine would do for example wow so it's been fun to watch people use the product really creatively and come up with some really interesting solutions but um yeah that's the really short answer yeah i i actually can imagine you probably had a lot of people in those days um you know binding your arm off to get the product because those were the days when autotask didn't even have um an email password at all there just was no such thing and so um yeah and so i'm sure that was something that uh a lot of people needed a lot of people wanted to to use so um and what you say about the um you know the workflows in order task i've actually spoken to a couple of my clients who are your clients too who kind of say they're doing some really funky stuff with your product so um i'm intrigued to see how you could do something like that and how it works so you know i don't know if you want to kind of just give us a rundown of the product show us what it can do and maybe show us some funky things that somebody might not know um the product is capable of doing yeah for sure before i get into it i'll say that i'm finding building this product i'm finding it really helpful to have my own background in the msp world because people will call me with the weird what i feel like is the weirdest request like okay i want to pull this kind of information out of autotask in this particular use case and only update it in certain ways and i'm like man that's the most obscure workflow ever but i'm happy to say i think we can do it like you know we have flexibility in the product that lets lots of people kind of solve really really niche cases um so yeah absolutely i'm excited to see what you've got i you know i did see it a while ago i know you and i had a demo you know a few months back and i'm sure it's it's come on a long way since then so um yeah you know this is going to be the first time i'm seeing a lot of the newer stuff that you got out as well yeah cool well let me share my screen here okay so this is what the console looks like when you first log into the system and what you're looking at here is a list of email addresses that are hosted by email to at so this very very first one for example is crm at travis.mxparser.net that would just be the email address that you use for this particular mailbox and so we've done here is created a whole bunch of mailboxes that do different things and so this mailbox here would be specifically for sofos alerts and so you as an msp might configure your sofo system to email sofo alerts at travis.mspiparser.com and then inside of this mailbox we might have rules that know how to specifically deal with sofos and create tickets update tickets close tickets that kind of thing so so can i just ask on that um that list there of domains so you've got all your your kind of you know mxi parser can i as an msp or you know anyone who's watching this can they use their own domain in here or do they have to use your ones that you've got yeah so if we scroll to the very bottom you'll see down here here's a list of domains active for this particular account and if we wanted to add another domain to the account which in msp can add as many as they need they just click add new domain they can do a hosted domain which is where they pick the prefix so i might say travis dot and then here's a couple domains that we own and host and so if i did like travis.onmspi.com as soon as i click activate it would be live and ready to go and i can send emails there i have a lot of customers and probably my favorite way to do it is using what we call a custom domain so this is where you might have if your msp was mymsp.com you might create like alerts.mymsp point the mx records to these two mail servers and then you would create email boxes on our system at alerts.mymsp so it might be like sophos at alerts.mymsp or you know webroot at my at alerts.mymsp.com etc etc and so in that way they can pick whatever domains they want they can completely white label it so their customers never see it never know it's us actually yeah awesome okay and these um uh where is this hosted is this in the u.s or have you got um servers anywhere else so we host an aws amazon web services um right now our system is live in the u.s east region which means it's out of virginia in the united states i'm happy to report that we are in the midst of a um additional deployment to the uk actually in the process and should be done in the next three weeks or so so we have one particular customer who i think is a mutual customer of ours who asked for that and we're able to to make that happen so that'll be exciting and then it took a lot of work to get the logic that we needed to have multiple regions now that we'll be able to have multiple then it should be easy to add you know australia or whatever else we need so as of today it's all in the u.s but right around the corner we'll be able to allow you to pick whatever data center you want awesome that's cool yeah back to the domains real quick just kind of a side note when i had my msp i had my like if my msp was called my msp if that was the name of it um i had mymsp.com was like my regular domain for my website my email and everything and then i created another domain called mymsp123.com and that domain i pointed to email to at and then i if you went to that website in your browser redirected to our screen connect or remote control software so it made it really easy on the phone with customers i would say you know they'd say hey we need help and it might be on a computer that's not an rmm i would say oh just go to www.mymsp123.com in your web browser and it goes right to where they need and then if we had any alerts or any automated systems or even people they could email specific email addresses at mymsp123.com and all that went to email to at so i just say that to say that the domains hosted in our system can be top-level domains or sub-domains nothing stops you from pointing like a root domain directly to the system here cool that's awesome so i'll just show you an example of one of these mailboxes obviously we can receive emails and create tickets and auto tasks it's a pretty standard i'll say boring feature you know it works well but it does kind of what auto task can do we can do that where we create a ticket based on the sender's email address but really where we shine is with creative workflows so you might have an email coming from a web form and the web form might always have the from address of web form mydomain.com and using the autotask built-in parser all of your tickets will always be assigned to the same account probably your xero account with our system you can actually extract the sender's email address from the body of the email and tell our system where to find it and then use that to identify the contact that we're going to associate the ticket to so now we're going to get tickets created for the right person in the right account this first example i'm going to show you i'll open it up crm at travis.mxparkster.net this is an example of an email that we would that we created that let's um how would i word this so let's say i'm an msp and let's say i'm emailing my customer directly from my personal inbox to his personal inbox this allows me to cc or add a carbon copy on the outbound email and i would cc crm at travis.mxparser.net and this particular mailbox has rules inside of it that i'll show you in a moment that would look at the incoming email see who it's from and who it's to so in this case it'd be from me to my customer and it would look up the customer in auto task and create a note on their account so this way i can email my customer directly and carbon copy my psa basically and have a note added to their account every time i send them an email and then when they respond if they reply all then they would also have crm at travis mxparser.net cc down there and in that case they will their response would also go to a note on the auto task account so this is just kind of a a way that you could have account management emailing a customer directly not in auto task but have a copy of it all in auto task automatically so okay so you don't need to basically use the um the active plug-in which or the autotask plug-in which does the same job pretty much yeah so the outlook plug-in requires you to open an extra screen select the customer do some click click clicks this way you just send an email and you just add one extra email address in the carbon copy and you're done in fact this logic could even with our remote mailbox feature which we haven't really talked about but this could actually log in your office 365 and just watch your scent folder and do the same thing every email you send we would just watch it and if it was sent to someone in your auto task you create a note on that autotask account and contact if not we just ignore it and then you don't even have to see anybody then it's just kind of magic and happens the background that's how i do it in my personal inbox and it's great so chris all the emails you've sent me are in my auto task associated to you and i've never you've never done anything different i've never done anything different it just kind of does it that's awesome wow just that on its own i think um i think people watching this now are probably filling in the form now to sign up with you just for that feature alone right yeah and this is just the first mailbox i still got 15 to go through absolutely so let me show you how the mailbox is actually built so i've explained the logic of it you know what it's going to do but let me show you what it looks like to actually configure it so over here on the right i have this edit button i'm just going to edit this mailbox and inside of the mailbox we've got a couple rules here that are loading actually there's only one rule which makes sense here so basically this is kind of inside the mailbox this is what it looks like this is the email address and then i've got a series of rules and if i had more than one i could order them and what we do is we always process the rules top down in order until you tell us to stop and each rule can have an expression on it that can optionally fire or not based on the criteria in this particular use case we will want every single message that comes into this mailbox we want that rule to fire so this rule here will fire on every single message but we could have a rule that says you know if the from address is xyz then take some extra special action or if the subject line contains some text or if the body contains some text and things like that so that's kind of the concept of the mailbox we've got these rules they fire an order let me open up this rule and show you how the actual rule is built let it load here there we go all right so inside the rule we've got a series of steps in these steps we have four of them this is the order they fire and order is important because we're kind of building a script so if i needed to move the order i could just reorder them here but this order is important so i'll read the i'll kind of describe the steps and then i'll show you what's inside of them so the first step in this example is we're going to query auto task for the recipient of the email so this is going to be these are going to take care of emails from me to other people this is going to always look up who it's sent to and see if they exist as a contact in autotask then in step two we're going to check and see if we [Music] we're going to look at the sender so in this case it's me and we're going to find a resource in autotask or an employee or a user in autotask that matches my address we're going to find my user account in autotask and then in step three if we found a contact then we're going to add a new note to that contact and that account and then in step four we're going to tell it to stop processing this email in case there was another rule after it in the mailbox that might fire for a catch-all or you know hey if this particular rule doesn't do anything then the next rule will fire so this step four is just gonna basically say we're good we don't need to take any other action on this email so go ahead and stop processing it so let's look inside step one this is the one where i'm looking up the recipient of the email in autotask to see if there are contacts so as i expand this step here you can see that we are taking this action so here's all the actions we can take in each of these steps we can do things like creating things in auto task updating querying things in auto task we can do regular expression matches um and some other things but those are the the basics is basically doing api calls to auto task so this first step we're going to query auto task for a contact by the way here's all the things we can query for so we can look up every single api entity that they give you access to so if you wanted to look up an invoice or a configuration item or you know anything that autotask exposes on the api we give you the access to do that in this case we're going to look for a contact and then here's our query builder that says what are we actually querying autotask for so here's all the fields on the contacts and in this case i want to look for a contact where active is one so it's an active contact and the email address equals the recipient or email address 2 equals the recipient or email address three equals the recipient so we're basically going to find an active contact with the email address that i'm sending the email to does that make sense yeah does okay and then we're going to take that contact and we're going to store it in a property on a variable and this is where it kind of is like a scripting language we're going to call it on a property called existing contact and so later in later steps we'll have access to custom.existingcontact and we'll have the entire object of the contact the id the name the address the phone number everything we got back from autotask will be available to us to use and i'll show you how we use it in just a second so in step two we're now going to do another query to auto task same kind of thing we're now looking for a resource so this is an auto task user where active is one so it's an active user and again where the email or email to or email three equals the sender so email from address basically the person sending the email we're looking for a resource that matches them and we're going to call the result of that custom.existing resource so at the end of step two i now theoretically have two objects i have a contact and a resource we pulled from autotask and now we're going to create something new in autotask using those two things in step three and that's going to be creating an account note and so these are all the things we can create in autotask we're going to create an account note here all the fields on the account note that i don't have listed here so here's most of the fields here account id contact id assigned resource id what kind of action what is the end date what's the name of the note what's the note itself what's the start date on the note and then there's other fields up here i could add that i'm not using so i just have them hidden can we end yeah i was gonna say can we does that include um udfs as well so can we write into a udf yeah yeah so unlike a ticket we could populate we could extract some information from the incoming email and populate a udf on the ticket or update the udf on an account yeah for sure okay so here we're going to create this account note and if you remember in step one and two we grabbed the contact and we grabbed the resource so the account id on the note i'm going to get that from the contact i got that matched and so if you recall i said i have custom dot existing contact i'm just going to delete this and show you i can type in something or i can use my curly brace and all of a sudden i have a list of those variables that are available so here's all the dynamic data that i could put into the account id field at runtime and i'm going to come down here i'm going to look for dot custom.existingcontact.account id so this is the account id of the contact we found that's the account id we're going to put the note on so i'm going to put that there and then the contact id with the same thing it's the existing contact id or the id of the contact we found so this is going to create a note on the account and the contact will you found the assigned resource for the note is going to show the existing resource id in other words the person sending the email the note type is a note so here's all the different note types that this particular autotask instance supports and i could just select this if i wanted to dynamically populate this with a variable at runtime i could unlock the field and now i can type whatever i want including using a value of a variable but in this case it's always going to be a note so i will just select note and hard code that and not do anything at runtime to select that the end date um so let's go ahead and delete this field and i'm going to dynamically put the date in and i'm going to say i want it to be now plus 15 minutes and so this will dynamically insert a timestamp that's 15 minutes from right now and then the start time is going to do the time stamp as of right now and then the name of the note will say copy of email colon space followed by the email subject line and then the note itself i'm having trouble hearing you my watch just heard me say something let me take it off um so the note itself will say from colon and have the email address and two colon have the email address subject and then the body and so the note on the auto task contact and account will look like this and i could put whatever other information i want in here so we have kind of a templating engine where we can put whatever we need we can insert any of these variables i could even insert like the contacts address if i wanted because i have that information that i pulled from auto task so it's available to me in all the steps um later and then in step four here we're gonna just stop processing the email so we've just come down here and said this step here is gonna stop processing the message completely we're totally done at this point and there's no other work to do on this email so we're good so that's kind of how we build this crm at ability to carbon copy this address and this this is out of the box or does does the sort of msp have to build this themselves for the crm one yeah so a lot of it is out of the box i'm back in the mailbox window now so this is back in the crm at travis.mxparser.net here's my list of rules if i create this mailbox from scratch i'm going to have no rules by default but then i can click on import from library and this is going to show me a list of some library examples and i could come through here and find a lot of things we've created for you where you can just one click import it or if there's something close to what you want you can use it as a starting place so in this crm example i think it's in here right here at the top crm bcc messages i just click import that's going to bring in those actions that i have here and i save it and now you'll notice i have two copies of that rule because i just imported uh this one from the library but i could change it i can you know use it as an example or i can just use it right there out of the box okay and this is the one where you say so they have to use this um as the bcc or the cc in in the email this isn't the one that's kind of watching your send items at the moment or is it the same rule that it uses correct this one because it's on a hosted mailbox the hosted mailboxes don't watch your office 365 sent folder or inbox but you could build a rule in a remote mailbox that's designed to watch your scent folder and do it silently okay that's awesome yeah so just a question then you were talking about um you mentioned invoices earlier on as one of the entities that we could pull so could we have a rule inside an an email that maybe a customer says can you send me my last invoice i didn't get it and we go in and find the invoice from all the tasks and send it to the customer yeah so that particular example is gonna be a little harder only because the last invoice is a little bit of a challenging query to do to auto task um there's not a good way to say i want to sort the results backwards and pick the last one if you happen to ask i want the first invoice that's really easy um but your particular example that's a little complicated but the idea of that is true so i'll give you another example i have this who am i down here who am i my cool msp at mxparser.net this mailbox does something similar to what you're talking about this when someone emails who am i actually people on this video you could actually do it and probably come back with no data because you're probably not in my sandbox auto task but this is going to look at the sender of the email pull up their account and autotask their contact in my sandbox autotask and their client portal user in my sandbox autotask and then respond to the email with a json object just a dump of the data of the account the contact and the client portal account and so this is an example of a way that i want to email into autotask have it look up some information and email it back to me and this does just like i said your contact your account and your client portal but you could do it with an invoice number if you said send invoice number you know whatever to me we could query for that invoice number and then send back the invoice and a list of items on the invoice so okay and actually that's probably more likely what somebody would do right is i'm missing invoice one two three can you resend it right so i guess then they could have that inside the email saying please resend invoice one two three yeah i've seen some people have it query auto task for open tickets that are assigned to a person as an auto task user or they're associated with a contact and send back a list of the open tickets for that person so that's kind of one interesting way that someone's using it i don't particularly like that because i feel like there's some security implications to allowing anyone to retrieve a list of tickets that they're associated to that way um but those are all possible technically if that fits your workflow absolutely and in terms of integrating with other sort of tools so um just thinking out loud here really in terms of like a like a hubspot or active campaign i mean if i've got something in one of those tools can i can i retrieve something out of there and stick it into auditor school yeah so our system lets you use a regular expression or text matching to when an incoming email comes in to extract information from that email so if hubspot or activecampaign is sending out an email to an address that ends up at email to at you can have email to at look for like the word name colon space something and take the part after that and hold it in a variable and then take another part of the email and hold it in a variable and then create a new contact and auto task for that email address that name and all the things you extracted from the incoming email so on the marketing side you could totally do that you could even use the autotask api to then associate that person with a contact group in autotask if you wanted to or take them out of a contact group or update a udf on them create a ticket for them you know kind of the sky's the limit i'm just thinking what are the things you might want to do with that and you can anything the autotest api will let you do our system gives you access to do those things okay and then equally i guess if and this is one that that comes up a lot and i think you mentioned this right in the beginning is you know if i send an email i'm the customer and i'm sending an email from chrisgmail.com it doesn't know who i am but is there some way that it can go hey i know that chris gmail.com is actually this guy in this contact and automatically associate me with the right company yeah so the way i would do that is i would have you add chris gmail.com in autotask on the contact unlocking alternate email fields and then we would just say here are the three fields of email did any of them match chris gmail.com okay all right so you'd still have to have it as the contact in in order task it wouldn't so because in in my case if it was chris.tim gmail.com now you've got my first name and my last name sure could you then match that totally you'd have to you'd have to build that logic but it i mean it would be very simple to say hey we're going to create a ticket for anyone who emails in if we don't find a contact and the part before the at sign has two words with a period i want to separate those at the period and then see if there's any auto task contacts that match the first name.last name that's in the part before the out sign and if we happen to have a match there then associate the ticket with that contact you could totally do that okay that would be cool yeah that's a good idea no one no one's asked that before so yeah and you know because a lot of people obviously yeah you wouldn't be able to do it if it was you know um you know just chris at because it could be any cruise but i guess if it was first name dot last name um then or i guess some variation of that right so chris.t at and you can kind of assume that it's going to be i guess if you've got more than one chris t it might be a bit of a problem but i guess you would be able to um you know figure it out and associate it at some points yeah the example you're giving is uh i i call it an email from a person as opposed to an email from an automated system and emails from people are always a little bit more challenging because you never know what's in the body of the email they're all formatted differently the sender can kind of be anything so i generally don't put too much automation on emails from people i just kind of like if we can find a match create the ticket for the contact great if we can't find a match then create a ticket in auto task somewhere else and then just manually fix that later i just find it's hard to automate the emails from people but it's the automated systems that send emails in that is really fun to create automations for and that's where i see tons of value in our users building interesting workflows yeah and i guess this could then also be if and i get this quite a lot as well where you know an msp might be working with a another company that has their own internal it or their own internal service desk um so they could then send a ticket out of their service desk into into order task and capture that information and um you know and then again put it against the right company or update the ticket whatever the case might yeah so like the first email you got for a particular ticket number from that outside company we would have it create a new ticket in auto task and then add that ticket number from the outside company in a udf on that ticket and auto task and then the next time a ticket came from that outside company with that ticket number we would find the existing ticket with that ticket number and update it so now outside systems sending emails to autotask the the our system knows how to create the ticket when it needs to be created or update it when it needs to be updated and you no longer have this bombardment of a new ticket every single time that outside system sends an email in and then you have all these new tickets that are related that you're trying to merge and everything else so our system just intelligently puts those together for you that's awesome yeah that's really cool so you mentioned in the beginning about um you know somebody replacing the um or you know i guess using this to replace the um workflow in in audit so do you want to kind of talk through that a little bit and you know if you've got an example of of how somebody might have done that yeah um so i have to start by saying that because of the way the system works users can kind of build whatever they want and i only hear about it if they have a question on how like hey you know i'm stuck at this spot can you help me with it or i stumble across their workflows so i know of a few examples and i know there's more examples of people that have built really cool stuff that i don't even know about which is pretty fun to be in that kind of position where like hey we built this cool tool and people are doing really neat stuff with it um the example i can think of would be like probably the simplest example would be an auto task workflow that needs to change the account of a ticket so you could think of something in auto task where like a particular ticket shows up a certain way we always want to change the account from you know whatever account it was over to this other specific account because that's how it always needs to be so we're trying to build a workflow for that well the auto task workflow engine doesn't let you edit an account on a ticket and so you kind of feel like well i'm just stuck i can't do anything here so in that case you know when that question comes to me i say okay what we're going to do is we're going to build a workflow and auto task that when it triggers however you've decided it needs to trigger we're going to have it trigger like normal but instead of that workflow rule updating the account on the ticket we're going to have that workflow rule send an email to email to at with only one thing in the email the ticket number and the subject line of the email then email t is going to get a ticket an email coming in with a ticket number in the subject line and we have it sent to a very specific email address so we're going to create like this cassette traverse alerts at travis mxparser.net or whatever it is we're going to auto task email that very specific email address the ticket number of the ticket and then email to at pulls that ticket with the api updates the account or whatever it is we wanted to do that the auto task workflow engine won't let you do and then now you've made the autotask workflow engine do extra stuff that it doesn't support out of the box just by sending a quick email over to our side that's awesome i'm actually gonna i'm gonna have a look at that and i'm probably gonna get you to help me with that after this call because great there's there's literally you know i i hear that pretty much most of the time because as you say you can't you can't update the company details from um you know from within the built-in in uh workflows so that would be an awesome thing to be able to do just by sending an email yeah you can mark a contact inactive which is something you can't do with a workflow you could even mark a contact inactive and create a new contact on a different account with all the information from the first contact so kind of move the contact between accounts but you're really copying it but still the effect of contact was on account a i need them over on account b we could totally do that with a workflow as well okay so that would be good i guess if if that contact moves from one company to another you could just yeah you could just use this to to completely move that contact yeah or if like if they're created on the xero account because they don't have a match in auto task and they maybe they get two or three tickets created and now you're like oh man i have two or three tickets on the wrong account the contacts in the wrong account so manually you're gonna have to go find the right account create a new contact type in their name type in their email address save it then go find all the tickets edit each one change the account change the contact save it then go find the contact the old one and market inactive that could be automated on our side so you could just you know however you want to identify that contact our side could then find the old contacts mark them as inactive move every ticket over to the new side create the contact on the new side and automate that process pretty easily okay i actually had a one of our customers reached out to me yesterday he said that he had 250 auto task configuration items that had the wrong config item type on them so he wanted them to go from standard to i think was a work workstation or something like that he's like i got these 250 config items can you help me and so in like 20 minutes we built a really quick workflow that queried for all the config items that had you know very specific information on them that we knew needed to be moved and edit each one to change it to the other thing you needed and in like 20 minutes he was all done he said wow that would have taken hours to go screen by screen click by click and edit all those config items that's kind of a one-off sort of thing he doesn't need to do it on a recurring basis but still saved him tons and tons of time and and that's a use case i see all the time as well right as people are are always wanting to change or update stuff in the product whether it be config items or or you know anything and it's very often something i have to manually do um so being able to build a workflow directly through this tool i think is gonna yeah you know massive benefit to most people and being able to do that really really quickly like you say that's awesome yeah okay can i show you a regular expression mailbox yeah yeah yeah go for it so on this list of mailboxes you see all these have black text at the beginning if i scroll in here at the bottom i've got some with this red text at the beginning so a regular expression for those who don't know is a a text string so a series of characters that define a pattern that you can later match against other text so we'll use it this ticket number one here because it's gonna look kind of crazy but once i explain it i think it'll make a lot of sense this string here is basically matching any series of letters followed by a dash followed by a t and then a two zero and then six more zero through nine and then a period and then four more zero through nine and then optionally that's what that parenthesis means optionally another period and three more numbers so this is looking for t two zero and then six more numbers dot four numbers dot three numbers in other words this is an auto task ticket number number yeah what this does is this is an inbound actually let's just skip down here let's use this one because it's a little simpler it's the same format you'll see this part here matches this part here but we're just not doing the part at the beginning so this right here is going to look for any thing that looks like a valid ticket number at travis.mxparser.net so now instead of this being xerox add a domain or testparser add a domain this is any ticket number at a domain and then inside of here we have probably one rule if i remember right yep one rule that if this mailbox fires this is going to look up the ticket number that's in the email address before the at sign and add a note to that ticket so now with this one mailbox with one rule and these five action steps every single ticket in this auto task has a direct email address format is kind of like this this highlighted part so i can email any ticket number at a certain domain and update that ticket and this is super helpful if you can imagine being on the phone with an isp for a customer because their circuit's down and the isp says oh yeah we can open a ticket on our side and we can send you updates as the work order gets fixed until the circuit's back online as a technician you might tell them okay please email support mydomain.com but would you please put the ticket number in the subject line otherwise we're going to get all these tickets for all your work order updates well they're not going to do it you're going to have all these tickets it's going to be a mess with this when they say hey we'll send you updates you say all right email me at t20210405.002 mydomain.com and now every single update from that isp regarding that work order is going to go to that ticket every single time no matter what is in the from address what's in the to address the subject doesn't matter it's always going to go on that ticket and so it's been really helpful to just consolidate all of those outbound addresses all those outbound emails onto the right ticket every time that's awesome okay so that's so so that's sending updates to a ticket without having the ticket number in the subject line so you can have anything you like in the subject line as long as the email is formatted as ticket number at yeah whatever the domain is yeah so it's kind of useful for a ticket you don't need it for ticket because you could put the ticket number in the subject line but now let's take that example that i gave and let's go down to the one between these two this one right here so this one works for the email address config item dash any series of numbers so this the emails that would work in here would be like config item dash 123 at travismxparser.net if you emailed that this rule here would fire or sorry this mailbox would would match and inside of the mailbox we have a rule that extracts the part after the dash looks for a config item in autotask without id and creates a ticket for that config item so this is really useful for printers firewalls ups devices and other things out in your infrastructure that send alerts when they go on battery power or when things happen and you can just hard code into that device hey printer when you send an email you always send it to config item-275 at mydomain.com and now every single email from that printer will always be created on the right config item on the right account no matter what is in the body or who's from or who it's that matters who it's two because it's being sent directly to its email address but then this way every config item has a direct email address that creates a ticket for that config item no matter what else is in the email that's cool i i really like that i think that's that's incredible i mean and again you know that's something i think that um is the you know the built-in process of built-in password isn't capable of doing that so you know it's just going to want to update a ticket with a number in a subject but being able to actually email in and update the configuration items specifically that's that's really cool and the powerful thing here isn't that we thought of it and now you can use it the powerful thing here is that we thought of it and you could build it or something like it so you might you or one of your customers might have a use case where they say you know what i don't need to send tickets for config items but every time a ticket comes in i need to add a billable charge to a particular ticket or to an invoice all right well we could just create a very specific email address for a ticket number or for an invoice number that every time it gets an email it adds a charge to that ticket whatever it is you know the the building blocks are there to build your own custom workflows for whatever makes sense for your business case and that's really where the power is um because auto tasks could add the ability to create a ticket for a config item like they could say hey that's a cool workflow but then that's just one more very specific workflow that's hard coded on the auto task side the power over here is that you can come up with whatever you need and we don't we're not saying here are the 10 things you can do with our tool we're saying here's all the building blocks to now do whatever it is you need to build for your use case in your business okay all right and so throughout this you've been kind of talking all of this to do with with autotask is there any other psa tool that you integrate with or is it only old task i'll just say not today today we're just with auto task plans to go to others i would hope to yeah i i'll say this i see tons of value to expand beyond autotask uh but we just you know there's other things that we've been spending time on and haven't had a chance to to branch out but i'd love to be able to to say that it's not just autotask but as of today i can't say that okay that's really cool cool have you got any other cool ones you can show yeah let me see what other things pop in here we have a feature called the reply all storm catcher that i think is pretty fun so you might know what it is just based on the name there but imagine you have a customer that emails your support team and carbon copies 10 people in their office so you know someone on one of your customers emails your support says are you know network's having problems and i'm seeing the boss and the boss's secretary and someone in accounting and someone in hr so all these people have this email that went into auto tasks and created a ticket well if all of those people reply all to that email you now have 10 new tickets in auto tasks because no one has the ticket number at this point because they're all responding to the first email has that ever happened to you chris millions of times yeah so our reply all storm catcher is a feature when we're updating tickets in auto task it can actually take a step back we create tickets in auto task we keep track of the message id it's a unique header in every email across the internet we keep track of what message ids we've created what tickets for and then anytime we get an email that comes in that doesn't have a ticket number if it has a header in it saying that it was created by clicking reply in outlook or mail or whatever the app is that is a reply to a message id we look and see if that message id was creating a ticket for us and if so we match them together so what it means is it doesn't matter what's in the subject line who it's from who it's to or anything if you know so and so created a ticket by replying to an email that created a ticket itself then we put them together and so in that reply all storm instead of having 10 or 15 new tickets in auto task you have one ticket with 10 or 15 notes on it everything's in the right spot i built it when we had the msp and i didn't tell our team about it and one day we had one customer who's notorious for just ceasing everybody and everybody replying and we all hated it and i we built it we deployed it we made it live and one of my um engineers came he's like what did you do because it it's pretty magical like what just happened everything was in one ticket it was clean concise beautiful uh and so that's one of my favorite kind of just it's just a checkbox you just check it and then our system will do this magic work for you in the background cool so in terms of um so all of these you know you talk about setting all of these things up and you showed the the library earlier on so um you know as an msp if they were to sign up with you and and buy this product um do you you kind of work with them to help them set up all of these kinds of things yeah so basically um when you first sign up you get access to it you can build whatever you want you have access to the library and we provide email support so if you have questions you can do that for anyone on this particular youtube if you just reach out to me and say hey i saw you on this interview with chris tim i would be glad to do a one hour onboarding call with them for no additional charge so they just sign up send an email to support msp integrations.com before or after they sign up doesn't really matter and we'll get that on the calendar interactively me and them work together and uh i'll personally build out your first set of rules so that you can hit the ground running and have some good success early on okay cool thank you for that yeah that that's brilliant i'm sure a lot of people will definitely take you up on there because you know looking at these it it looks very um very comprehensive but equally i think for somebody who's never seen it before it could get quite complicated and yeah you know just set up so i think they probably need a lot of handholding in the beginning at least yeah that's a good way to describe it it is comprehensive but it is complicated as well yeah yeah because you know and i know i i've seen it um you know a few times and you know when i've tried to set stuff up i know it's quite a lot of those things you know it can take you a while to get your head around so it's just good to have somebody that you can say hey how do i do this or i need to set this up um so now that's really cool i i it i think this is fantastic i mean there's i'm sure there's going to be a lot of people at the end of this who are going to be literally bashing your door down so hopefully it's going to get you a lot of business out of this well thanks i i appreciate the opportunity yeah so i mean is there um is there any other particular things that that are um you know that you wanted to show on this i mean is anything that um you haven't gone through yet that somebody might um might see and and want to use yeah i'll keep the i have a couple things i'll keep these really high level and if any of them are interesting to anyone who's watching this you can just reach out to me and i'll gladly do a personalized demo of those things but one of the things is our remote mailboxes over here i showed you hosted earlier so that's where you're forwarding emails to us these are remote mailboxes so this is where we're logging into an imap server this is the imap server we're logging into and we're watching this folder and then our system is just sucking emails in that are in that folder so for your support at yourdomain.com you might have that as an office 365 mailbox and you just have our system log into your office 365 watch the inbox and then any messages that shows up there pull them in so you're not forwarding to us you're actually leaving them in the inbox that we can process in there and then our system can move them to other folders and kind of file them away but you know it's just a different way to get the email in once the email's in the rules are exactly the same the actions are exactly the same the same logic is available but now instead of you having to forward to us we can grab the email where it is in place so it's kind of a nice feature and then over on history great um if i come over here i can see this is an example of an email that came in and you know i did some data purging so this isn't actually showing what i want you to see but every message that comes in we keep it for six months and you can see under action history here you'd be able to see every single step we took what we queried what auto tasks sent back and all the particulars about the workflow that happened so you're never left with this black box where you say hey we sent an email in and it showed up an auto task over here but we don't know why the system like we built the rule but i don't know why it did what it's supposed to do so here on this screen you'd be able to see hey we looked this up in autotask this is the result we got we pulled this information from the email auto task rejected it with whatever and we give you very detailed logging so as someone who's building these custom workflows it makes it really easy to troubleshoot that way and then the last kind of quick thing is we have a different product that's really similar called scheduled tasks and everything i've showed you on the incoming emails those have all been based on emails coming in scheduled tasks will do the exact same types of workflows same action steps we can query things look things up in auto task we do them on a schedule instead of when an email comes in so every monday morning do you want to look at all your config items and find all your servers and create a new ticket for every server that you know tells you to do something we can do that we can create recurring tickets we can automatically extend contracts we can review tickets in your auto task and add notes if they fit a certain criteria we can query for a particular kind of ticket format them together and send an email to somebody and say here's all 10 tickets that match that criteria today lots and lots of flexibility there and this is actually the product that i was telling earlier about those configuration items that were miscategorized we actually created a scheduled task for that to find all those config items and move them for you um so those are my my last three things at quick high level for you that's awesome okay so so on the schedule task so that doesn't need any kind of email to be sent or anything it just works in the background and just says whatever it is so go and update all these contracts or go ahead and yep great yeah so you say you know do it every monday or do it every five minutes or do it once a year and it just does it on that recurring schedule okay um so as human when somebody buys this product they they're obviously this is going to replace the um the order task incoming process so they're not actually going to use that in conjunction with us or is there a case where they might need to use both or can use both i'm always a big fan of uh i kind of take this from carl policek actually his zero time zero downtime migration philosophy i'm always a fan of building up new infrastructure next to my existing infrastructure and then slowly moving over and never getting to a point where i have to hard cut over and not be able to go back so i say that to say that i actually recommend if you're using the auto task parser to continue using it leave it on build new logic on our side and then start sending some messages to us while you're still using the auto test parser and kind of slowly move in what you don't want to do is you know if you have 10 email boxes on auto task you don't want to build 10 more on our side cut over everything on a monday morning and then be like oh no no i have all these things that aren't quite exactly as i expected so you can i have plenty of people who use both even who have successful things set up on the auto task parts that work well for certain instances and then they use us for some other things that don't work on the auto task side and it just who cares if it's working on auto task keep it there you don't need to move it unless there's something on our side that you need to do and then okay now we'll move that you know particular logic over okay that's awesome cool oh travis this has been absolutely amazing it's opened my eyes to a lot of stuff and i there's definitely some stuff in here that that i can use myself so i'll be certainly reaching out to you um after this and i know that um you know i'm already as you've been talking i've been thinking of about probably six or seven customers already that need pretty much everything you've talked about i mean just you know a perfect example is i i have one customer who was asking about um you know changing or renewing contracts on bulk um and they they're not able to do that easily in order to ask or at all um so you know having something like this i think literally they would they would pay the money to to get this tool just to use that feature so i'll tell you when you sign up for email to at it actually goes into out my auto task and creates a new contract and a service bundle and activates it that way that's how i do billing for my own customers and so my own system logs into my auto task and every single month extends the end date of every contract so it's two months in the future so every month i add a month to every contract i don't have contracts that are 900 years long like there's auto task makes you pick an end date for recurring services contract which i don't get i think it makes sense in some cases but in my case i don't need that and so i just perpetually edit the end date every single month it's always two months out in the future and so it's worked out well for me for 10 years doing that it's been just a great set up that way awesome so um travis if anyone wants to get hold of you what's the best way they can do that yeah so if they want uh information on the product they can email support mspintegrations.com if you want to reach out to me i'm always willing to talk it's travis.austin at mspintegrations.com awesome thank you travis i'll make sure that those uh get put into the notes below so and thank you you know so much for your time really really appreciate it and you know always in awe of what you're doing i mean this is just an incredible product uh thanks it's been a pleasure to be here and i look forward to you know helping out in the future any questions you have i'd love to help you build some cool workflows for your auto task excellent thanks travis really appreciate it for sure thanks chris thanks cheers you