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Why doesn't the Outlook add-in detect the contact's incident when forwarding the original email?

Environment:

Outlook Integration, February 2009 and later

Issue:

The Outlook Integration creates an incident from a contact's email, but after this email is forwarded internally by the support team, the Outlook Integration doesn't find the contact's incident anymore, in order to append the new internal emails from the support team.

Resolution:

In order for the Outlook Integration to identify the contact and its open incidents, you will need to add the contact in the "Cc" field of the email and make sure it stays there for the duration of the email exchange. As long as the contact is in the "Cc" field, you can use the Outlook Integration at any moment to add the emails to his or her incident's thread.

Cause:

The Outlook Integration detects the contacts used in the "To", "From" and "Cc" fields of the email. It then checks if these contacts have any open incidents in the application and offers the option to append the content of the email to either one of those incidents, or to create a new one.

Initially, when a new email is received from a contact, the Outlook Integration correctly identifies it in the database since the contact is in the "To" field of the email. A new incident is created for this contact and the support team forwards the email internally to other teams in order to solve the customer's issue. These internal emails are relevant for the investigation and the team wants to append them to the contact's incident, but when trying to do so from the Outlook Integration, it doesn't detect the contact, or its existing incidents.

This happens because the contact was removed from the email header. When the initial email was received, the contact was in the "To" field, but it was subsequently removed when the support team forwarded the email internally. This is why the internal emails cannot be appended to the contact's incident.