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Why are incidents updated with the entire incident thread?

Environment:

Incoming Email
Oracle B2C Service, versions August 2013 and greater

Issue:

When customers reply to an existing incident via email, the entire email may be added to the incident thread instead of just the new updated information.

Note: When the entire email would update the thread, a separate file attachment may be appended to the incident because of the size. The .txt attachment is typically named "Attachment 1.txt" and it contains the content of the email.

Resolution:

Oracle B2C Service lets customers update incidents by replying to email messages. Typically, customers include the original message in their reply, quoting back the email they received with their reply at the top and sometimes a standard footer.

When the Techmail utility detects an email reply, it attempts to identify the part of the message containing the customer's reply and strips out any text that may have been quoted back from the original message thread. In this way, new replies are added to the incident as a new entry in the incident thread while text from previous thread entries is ignored.

A byte count/check sum method is used to determine what is outside the original email received from Oracle B2C Service whether above or below the original message. The outgoing message from Oracle B2C Service includes a tag line similar to the following.  This will be visible in the text/plain part of the message and hidden in the text/html part of the message.

[---001:001111:46978---]

This byte count/check sum is determined from the original message and calculated at the time it was sent.  If anything is added in the original message, then the byte count/check sum will not match and entire message is used to update the incident thread.

For example, if a customer replies to multiple points within the original email, inter-mixing the reply with the original text, these changes are preserved in context of the original message and the entire email message is inserted into the incident thread.

If you have updated the site from older versions and are still using the previous "reply-between-the-lines" methodology, please reference Answer ID 2017: Disabling "reply-between-the-lines" in incident responses to disable this feature. This methodology is typically no longer used.