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Hi, We have a use case that has become very frustrating to deal with.



Agent forwards a customers email to a FD User.



If the User to whom the ticket is forwarded replies to that email, a private note is created. this is the expected system behavior and works fine!



If however another FD User responds to the same fwd. email, it creates a public note. Forwarded emails from a case can go to different internal teams and users but in no way do we want to have a public note created as it ends up going to the requestor (customer) which contains private internal confidential info.



we have tried all possible work arounds but there doesnt seem to be a solution to this.



Is there a freshplug that converts public notes to private? Or removes content of a public note when an agent replies to a ticket?



Dear Asim, there are also other users raising that issue ( including me ). There even was some subtle hint that Freshdesk might reconsider their stance on this. What most of us consider proper action is that in order for a reply from an agent to become a public note the requester's email address must appear as a To or CC recipient of the agent's email - in any other case it should become a private note.

 





Thanks for the response Thanos. I was hoping that someone with good knowledge of FD like yourself could propose some work around. This a real show stopper for us as we never had to deal with this issue using Salesforce or Zendesk. FD Support has recommended that we try using the email command "Action": "Note" to insert private notes but that doesnt help either because A) its impossible to enforce this among several back office users in my org and 😎 the email command also becomes a public note after a second agent responds to the same forwarded email thread. We are left with no other choice but to convert our occasional users to contacts and their responses create new tickets which can be later manually merged with the parent (original) ticket. In that case the responses are captured as private notes. Such a tedious and cumbersome process to handle something so simple. We are really regretting our decision to go with FD considering all these hiccups. 






If you have any other suggestions or workarounds to avoid the public notes, I would be happy to hear!



There is no real workaround for this. For me this is definitely a bug and it has to be fixed by Freshdesk.

We are constantly fearful that some private correspondence will inadvertently leak to a customer because an agent will forget that list address X is also delivered to Freshdesk and it will become a public note.




BTW: I am under the impression that when I tested the "Action": "Note" email command as an agent, it created a public note. now that I re-tested it, it creates a private note. Silly as it sounds, maybe this should be added in each agent signature ( probably, in some hidden div when email is in HTML format ).






I just tested that "workaround". I included in the signature of my agent email account the following and it worked reasonably well. 
    <span style="color:#fff; font-size: 5px;">@Simonsays "action":"note" @Simonsays</span>


The color that matches the background and the small size of text is a ( pathetic ) attempt to hide this text.





Thanks Thanos, it worked well for the first Agent who responded to the forwarded ticket but the second agents response still generates a public note!! :(



So basically the workaround is only a partial work around that reduces the risk to some extent. In tickets that will have a lot of agents interacting, the problem would still be there....Did you also notice the same?













Dear Asim, this is not related to the issue of public notes created by emails from agents but to the workflow: I have posted an App in https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/313053 that adds a forward option to private notes and this might also be of interest to you.

 





Hello everyone,






We are in the process of fixing this bug and hope that the fix will be deployed next week. Please bear with us until that time and I will post back to the forum once the deployment is done. Specifically, the bug is that when an agent forwards an email and additional internal people are added to the thread, those responses are not being recorded as private notes.






Regarding the email commands, we will look into it and let you know what we find out.






Thanks,



Sudha









@ Asim

Dear Asim, did the 2nd agent also have this in his/her signature ?
For this to work, it has to be in the ( Outlook or whatever mail user agent you use ) signature of all agents.



@ Sudha/Freshdesk

The behavior I would expect is this:

- If an email from an agent email address ends up in an existing Freshdesk ticket thread and DOES NOT CONTAIN the requester email address in the To or CC, it should be

turned into a PRIVATE NOTE.
- If an email from an agent email address ends up in an existing Freshdesk ticket thread and

contains the requester email address in the To or CC, it should be

turned into a public note.





@Thanos, Here are the results of another round of tests:-



User Case: an email is forwarded from a ticket to User A, User B responds to the same forwarded email and uses the email command "action":"note"; the note created is private. Now Another User C responds to the same fwd email using the same email command "action":"note"; the note added is public. I am now convinced beyond doubt that this is another bug! :( below screenshots can confirm this:-





















Its obvious that the system is detecting the email command and removing it from the email contents but not doing what it is supposed to do i.e. insert a private note instead of public, i am not sure if other email commands behave the same way but the private note adding is definitely wrong!








We should be able to toggle a note between public and private.  This is an issue that I brought up before.  An agent is supposed to make this decision when creating the note, but may forget or make the wrong choice.  An admin can delete the note and recreate it with the opposite flag, but that may put the note out of sequence if there has been further action in the ticket.  






I was once given a feeble work-around - a plug that was supposed to make a public note private - but that just was a macro to delete the note and re-add it as a private note.  This did not work for agents with no right to delete - it just left two notes.  Also, the new note was created with the current time stamp and associated with the user performing the action, not the original agent.





@Gregg thanks for the feedback, I was hoping that there would be plug to help with some sort of a workaround. deleting public notes and adding them as private notes still seems much less a risk compared to the other workarounds we have evaluated. Could you possibly share the fresh-plug so we can give it a go? All our agents have the access to add and delete notes hence this may be a temporary solution for us until FD comes up with a permanent fix. Thanks again



Dear Asim, I deleted my last post because it was garbage. I hadn't noticed that this was a composite image...

 





@Asim - I was actually mistaken. The FreshPlug that we received was to change a note from private to public. We were told the reverse was not easily possible for some reason. I have attached that to this message in hopes that it is helpful.



Dear Asim, was there any progress ?

 





Hello All, Finally some good news! FD has responded to my ticket informing that a fix has been implemented. I have performed some initial tests that confirm that multiple Users responding to a forwarded email from a ticket are now creating private notes! I have tested 2 users and it works fine; more tests will follow covering additional use cases to validate the results :)



That's nice Asim.

 
























Hi Everyone, 



 



As mentioned by Asim Khattak, the recent fix that was deployed has sorted this issue. Hence, when an email is forwarded to a list of users and when they now respond to that forward, it will definitely be appended as a private note, thus fixing the question in place. 



 



Regards,





 



Sukanya


























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