Automated Email

Not everything that reaches your support address was written by a person. Newsletters, mailing-list welcome messages, system notifications, out-of-office replies and bounces all arrive the same way as customer email. Scitor recognises this automated mail and gives you the choice of what happens to it: by default it becomes a ticket with an auto-generated label, so nothing disappears without you knowing.

How Scitor recognises automated email

Scitor looks at the standard headers that mail software adds to machine-generated messages. It does not read the message content to decide. A message counts as automated when, for example:

• it carries Auto-Submitted with any value other than no (vacation responders, bounce notices, notifications)
• it carries Precedence: bulk, junk or auto_reply (newsletters, mailing-list admin mail, older auto-responders)
• it carries an out-of-office marker such as X-Autoreply or X-Auto-Response-Suppress
• it is a bounce (an empty return address)
• it comes from your own Scitor sender address, looping back

Forwarded mail and mailing lists that relay real people’s messages are not treated as automated. That covers a Google Group used as your support address, mail forwarded from your own mailbox, and Auto-Submitted: auto-forwarded.

New messages: you choose

For a new message (one that isn’t a reply to an existing ticket), set inbound.auto_generated in .github/scitor.yaml:

inbound:
  auto_generated: label   # default: create the ticket, labelled `auto-generated`
  # auto_generated: drop  # don't create a ticket for automated mail

Any value other than drop is treated as label, so a typo never starts discarding mail.

What’s different about an auto-generated ticket

Automated mail is a ticket like any other, but Scitor doesn’t treat it as a customer waiting on an answer:

• No spam label. The spam:* label is left off, so workflows that act on spam:clean (an auto-acknowledgement, for instance) don’t reply to a robot.
• No SLA clock. Nobody is waiting, so no response or resolution deadline starts.
• No CSAT survey when the ticket is closed, even if your own csat.exclude_labels list doesn’t mention auto-generated.
• No merging. Automated mail is never added to an existing ticket by subject deduplication, so a recurring newsletter or alert can’t reopen a customer conversation. Each message gets its own ticket.
• AI analysis still runs if you’ve enabled it (ai: true on a plan that includes it), so categories and summaries work as usual.

To stop a recurring sender for good, close one of its tickets and use /block-sender, or set auto_generated: drop.

Replies to a ticket: always dropped

When an automated message answers one of your replies (an out-of-office notice, a bounce, an auto-responder), Scitor never adds it to the ticket, whatever auto_generated is set to. Otherwise every out-of-office reply would show up as a customer comment and reopen the ticket, and two auto-responders could keep answering each other forever. This applies to replies sent to the ticket’s reply address and to replies that reach your main address but reference a message Scitor sent.

Nothing is lost silently

Automated mail that Scitor doesn’t deliver, whether a reply to a ticket or a new message under drop, is kept for 7 days rather than thrown away. If you think something was held back by mistake, contact us within that window and we can deliver it to your repository. A delivered copy is never held back again. If it was a new message, it arrives as an auto-generated ticket.

Related

• Spam Detection: spam scores are labels, never a reason to drop mail
• Blocked Senders: permanently ignore a specific address
• Rate Limiting: cap how much one sender can send
• inbound configuration