Back in November we posted some best practices around the use of Email To Case.  With Spring '09 we've made a few changes which will be a great help to you Email To Case users out there.

The first and most salient change is that we now offer Email To Case as a Service (known in the setup as On Demand Email To Case).  This means that you no longer need the Email To Case Java client which you previously had to install onsite to monitor your inbox.  You can turn on On Demand Email To Case simply by going to Setup->Customize->Cases->Email To Case -- the same place where you have always set up Email To Case.

When you turn on On Demand Email To Case, Salesforce.com will generate inboxes for each of your routing addresses.  If you don't already have any routing addresses set up, now's the time to do so; you should create one routing address for each email address you'd like to monitor.  Then, for each routing address, you can set your mailbox to redirect incoming messages to the generated Salesforce.com inbox, and On Demand Email To Case will process it and create a case or thread it into a case as appropriate.

The first question people always ask when I say this is:

If I forward all my emails, won't that add an "FW" to all the emails and make them all look like they're coming from me instead of from the customer?

You don't want to forward the emails -- you want to redirect them.  Unfortunately, some email providers conflate the two terms.  For those of you who are using Outlook, you'll see that there's a rule you can make through the Rules & Alerts wizard which says "when an email arrives, redirect it to..."  That's a true redirect -- the From address and subject remain unchanged.  In Gmail, on the other hand, you'll find this option in Settings->Forwarding and POP/IMAP -- if you set it to forward a copy of incoming mail to your Salesforce.com inbox, it will actually do a redirect -- as with Outlook, the From address and subject remain unchanged, despite the fact that it's called "Forward."

So there is a bit of a dichotomy in terms, but almost all email systems have the capability to redirect emails, even if they call it "forward."

Once you've set up your inboxes to redirect emails to their respective On Demand Email To Case inboxes, On Demand Email To Case will process the emails just as the old Email To Case did -- the functionality to the end user is identical.

However, while we were at it, we did add a couple of bells and whistles to the Email To Case setup.  First of all, many people complained that Email To Case always created an open Task which cluttered up their Task view.  You'll notice that Email To Case setup now allows you to skip creation of the Task.  Also, if you'd like to maintain the Task (for instance, so you can see emails on the Contacts page, where there is no dedicated Emails related list), you can choose which status you want that Task to be created in -- so it can be set to closed immediately upon its creation.

We also noticed that email messages were eating a lot of our customers' storage space, and that 75% of the storage space occupied by emails was actually just the email headers, which customers rarely need.  To address this we added a new setting called "Save Headers" which is off by default.  When you turn this off, the headers will not be saved, which can result in a significant storage savings to you if you are taking a lot of emails.

The above two options, the task creation settings and the Save Headers setting, will work for both On Demand Email To Case and the Email To Case client.

There is one more option that is specific to On Demand Email To Case, and that is Allowed Domains.  Here, you can set On Demand Email To Case to reject emails if they are not from a specific domain -- so, for instance, you can create an internal-only On Demand Email To Case box which will reject any emails from outside the company.  Leaving the Allowed Domains box blank will allow the On Demand Email To Case box in question to accept emails from all domains.

Finally, a note on spam.  People often ask me whether we provide spam filtering as part of Email To Case, and the answer is no, we don't.  Spam filtering is not easy, and it's not our core competency -- we leave that to the experts like Postini.  Also, we have a number of customers who don't want spam filtering -- they'd rather take every email than miss a legitimate customer email that has been misidentified as spam.  As such, we don't plan to offer spam filtering at this time.  However, if you would like spam filtering, we'd advise you to put a spam filter like Postini or Gmail's filter on the inbox you're monitoring with Email To Case.