Case capture: routing rules, blocked senders, duplicates and inbound sources
Case capture is what happens between a message arriving and a case being created. It lives under Settings > Case capture and applies to every entry point at once: the support mailbox, the help center form, inbound sources you register, contact requests, phone calls and bots. With nothing configured,
Case capture is what happens between a message arriving and a case being created. It lives under Settings > Case capture and applies to every entry point at once: the support mailbox, the help center form, inbound sources you register, contact requests, phone calls and bots. With nothing configured, cases are created exactly as before.
Routing rules. Each rule says where a message came from (a mailbox such as billing@, a sender domain, words in the subject or body, or a specific inbound source) and what the case should receive: queue, priority, category, owner and tags. Rules run in order; each one fills what has not been decided yet, and a rule marked "stop after this rule" ends the chain. The decision is applied when the case is created, so the SLA is computed with the right priority from the first second. The inbound channel of the case is not decided here: it comes from the channel map. Use "Try it" to see what your rules would do with a sample message; it runs the same evaluation as the real intake.
Blocked senders. Add an email, a domain (subdomains included) or a phone number. Messages from blocked senders never become cases and never trigger the receipt auto-reply. Each block is recorded in the trail with the reason, and the list shows how many times each entry matched.
Duplicates. Turn on duplicate detection to stop the same requester from opening three cases about the same subject in one afternoon. When a new message arrives from a requester who already has an open case with a similar subject inside the window, the message is appended to that case as a new reply instead of creating another. If you prefer to keep a human in the loop, choose "open the case and flag it": the case is created and marked as a possible duplicate. The "Possible duplicates" tab also finds pairs that already exist; merging keeps the older case (the protocol the customer already received) and closes the newer one with a link to it.
Inbound sources. Register a source, copy its URL and point any form or system at it. Map where each field lives in the payload (for example customer.email) or leave the mapping empty to use the obvious keys (subject or title, message or body, email, name, phone). Defaults fill queue, priority and category when the payload does not say. An optional honeypot field discards bots. If the payload carries an external id, sending it twice never creates two cases. Rotating the URL invalidates the old one immediately.
Conversations, calls and bots. In the inbox, "Open a case" turns a WhatsApp, chat, SMS or social conversation into a case with SLA and protocol; if the conversation already has one, the button opens it. In a record's calls list, "Open a case from this call" creates a case with the transcript and recording, once per call. Conversational bots can use the open_case tool to create a case at the end of a flow, once per conversation.
Trail. The trail lists every intake attempt and its outcome (created, appended, blocked, invalid, merged) for the last 30 days, so "why did this email not become a case?" always has an answer.