We're facing two issues with FluentSupport and I'm wondering if others have the same experience?
Hey everyone,
We're facing two issues with FluentSupport and I'm wondering if others have the same experience:
- When someone sends in an email formatted in HTML, the styling gets stripped or displays incorrectly — just plain text or messed-up layout.
- When someone forwards an email, we only see their message, not the actual forwarded email content. So the thing they're trying to show us is missing.
Is this a known limitation or is there something we’re missing in the settings?
Thanks!
– Marco
Known limitations; reported that right at the very beginning.
We setup specific email inboxes that forward the emails rather than forwarding directly so that we can see the original emails if we need to. Kind of a pain, but it works.
Also helps if their AWS settings go wonky and it starts dropping our emails before putting them in our support portal, which thankfully hasn't happened for a while, but was the original impetus to stop forwarding directly.
Yes, known limitations - same here.
The parser for the forwarded emails needs to remove layout and formatting, because it's essentially trying to turn the email content into a Ticket. Tickets on Fluent Support only support Rich Text formatting. So the HTML layout gets lost in the parser.
Forwarded content appear differently to the parser as opposed to the main email content. The parser for email piping has these limitations.
We're actively looking for better ways to solve these issues on the Parser. However can't really guarantee a fix will be available soon.
Thanks for bringing this up!
Yes, I encountered the same issue. I have now given up on using the email pipeline in Fluentsupport.
Rick Landry Have you come up with an alternative to pull emails in, or are you just not using emails/FluentSupport?
Rick Landry Hey Rick! I'm sorry to hear that! Could you share the exact issues that made you move away from the email piping feature? You're insight could be helpful to make improvements.
Jonathan Gwyer Right now, there really isn’t a great system that offers solid email support, so I’ve just been using the Foxmail client to handle email replies.
There are a few other email tools worth checking out—for example, this list on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/categories/email-clients
or spikenow.com.
Rasel Siddiqe The biggest issue for me is that when customers send emails with images or attachments, those files sometimes go missing.
Occasionally, images and attachments show up just fine in FluentSupport. But other times, they simply disappear.
This has really frustrated my customers—some of them clearly included images in their emails, but our support agents kept saying they didn’t receive anything. After dealing with several angry customers, I had no choice but to stop using FluentSupport.
I honestly believe FluentSupport was designed more as an internal tool for your team. It works great when customers create tickets directly on your website after buying a WPManageNinja product.
But in my case, I run an e-commerce site. Customers only come to my site to make a purchase—they don’t create accounts or stick around. All our communication happens through email.
Rick Landry that's a shame, I was hoping you'd found some other magic way to connect email to Fluent Support!
Rasel Siddiqe My issues with email piping:
- attachments/images not always there
- loss of forwarded content
- different subject emails being put into the same ticket
- should be able to force creation of a new ticket when the original ticket is closed
That will do for now 😀
Jonathan Gwyer Noted Jonathan! Gives me a lot of stuff to talk about in the Developer meetings. I think a whole refactor is necessary to make the parser more versatile and robust.
I'd also request you to check out the parser I've provided Rick, and share your thoughts. I'm considering launching a survey for users that experience the same issues with email parsers.
Would help us identify the instances/scenarios where the parser fails to compute properly.
Thanks Rasel Siddiqe - unfortunately I'm not in a position to set up my own Amazon Lambda instance.
I've just posted an update to my ticket #136433 with a great example.
A 3 year old ticket with the subject "Some bits and bobs on the back end i have questions about" that had long been closed, was reopened and updated by an email with the subject "Few bits and bobs"
If the person who had closed the original ticket 3 years ago had left the company then we would never have seen the update. Fortunately, they still work here, because it's an important client.
But that's really bad.
Rick Landry Okay that is a severe issue. I understand it's a huge hassle for maintaining customer communications.
We're going to look into the file attachment issues. Since, it's occuring randomly, we'll have to identify the exact cases where the files go missing. Thanks for taking the time to explain your issue. This gives me a better case to make to the devs to refactor the parser.
I know this might seem like a dodging tactic, but I would request you to check this out. It's a parser you can configure on your own Amazon Lambda instance. It might help both sides if this works for your system.
https://github.com/WPManageNinja/fluent-support-email-parser
Rasel Siddiqe Yes, I’ve spoken with your support team. They also suggested I try parsing the emails myself using Amazon Lambda, which I did.
Unfortunately, that ended up working even worse than your built-in parser. I also noticed that the version on GitHub hasn’t been updated in three years. I’m guessing the parser at https://github.com/WPManageNinja/fluent-support-email-parser might just be too outdated.