Email Notifications Triggering Automatic Replies

Email Notifications Triggering Automatic Replies

Sometimes, people will set an automatic reply on their email account when they are out of office, on vacation, or closed for holidays. This is great most of the time because it sets proper expectations for those trying to reach them. When dealing with Email Notifications from CleanTelligent, however, it can sometimes cause an Infinite Loop between CleanTelligent and the email address receiving email notifications.

What is an Infinite Loop?

An infinite loop, as defined by Wikipedia is, "a sequence of instructions that, as written, will continue endlessly, unless an external intervention occurs.”

With CleanTelligent Users who can create work orders, an infinite loop can be created if they have out-of-office auto-replies turned on within their own email AND have email notifications turned on within CleanTelligent.


This can get exponentially worse if there are multiple users getting email notifications for the same work order/message, their email is sending out-of-office auto replies
The infinite loop can happen if the following is true for these users' email notification settings:
  1. They have email notifications for all new/replies to work orders/messages both internal and external
    1. This one is not so bad if they are the only ones with out-of-office replies turned on as long as #2 is not true
    2. This will still trigger an infinite loop if multiple users are sending auto-replies and the system generates a reply for the work order and then sends out the new email notification
  2. They have email notifications for replies to work orders/messages they create
    1. This has to do with their own work order/message replies in CleanTelligent. With this turned on, they will get notified via email each time they reply to a work order/message.
    2. This will almost always create an infinite loop of work order reply => email reply =>work order reply scenario. 

What can be done to break this vicious cycle?

There are only 2 ways to resolve this cycle
  1. Stop the auto-reply from the email address
  2. Stop the email notifications in CleanTelligent

Stop the auto-reply from the email address.

All email services that have auto-reply message capability also have the capability to exclude certain email addresses and email domains from the auto-reply parameters. Simply direct the user to exclude the email domain that the email notifications are coming from and voila. No more loop. Email notifications will come from one of the following domains:
  1. @cleantelligent.net and @cleantelligent.com (all accounts will receive emails from these email domains)
  2. Possibly another email domain, if your CleanTelligent account has purchased white-labeled branding
If you are unsure what email domain to exclude from your out-of-office auto-reply rules, check the email notifications you are getting from CleanTelligent and look at the From email address. The domain is everything after the @ sign.
Excluding these from the auto-reply send list will your auto-reply rule from replying to anything you receive from CleanTelligent.

Stop the email notifications in CleanTelligent

If the you are unable to get these users to successfully exclude the emails listed above from their individual auto-reply rules, your top-level admin user can go into CleanTelligent and edit these users' email notification rules and turn them off at least until the user comes back into the office and/or changes their rules.

Because a good out of office notification may be useful, you may decide to leave the email notification setting for all new work orders and only turn off the email notification settings for the replies to work orders/messages (external, internal, or self-created) so that the auto-reply still comes in when the new work order/message is created but does not continue to send auto-replies for any replies to that work order/message.

See Email Notifications and Email Notification Templates from the CleanTelligent Knowledge Base for details on email notifications and applying the same settings to multiple users using the Email Notification Templates option in CleanTelligent.

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