deleting email deletes case history

**ricvil** · 2006-01-09, 10:30 PM

I just found out about an odd behavior.

When a case is worked on and emails fly back and forth with a customer, the case history gets populated accordingly. The supervisor can view the case and follow through on whats been going on. The case is then closed and the tech person proceeds to clean up his INBOX. But as soon as he does, all case history pertaining to those emails gets deleted as well! Ouch.

How then can we view weeks or months later what actually happened in that case? The history is almost empty. And I don't think its practical to instruct everybody to never delete emails.

Thanks.

**sugarchris** · 2006-01-10, 12:39 AM

Hi ricvil,

After some lengthy discussion with the devs and our manager, the scenario that you just described deserves some serious attention.

The resolution is to implement a feature that is like outlook's "Archive" - we'll let the user flag emails as "archived" (different from the "Create Archive Email" functionality) that will preserve all history with customers and whatnot, but remove themselves from the "My Inbox" view. Ultimately, that is what is wanted, right? A clean slate to start, so to speak?

You can track this as bug 4098 at http://bugs.sugarcrm.com

**sugarchris** · 2006-01-10, 02:11 AM

Hi rcivil,

Although what your user did is totally within the limits of "As Designed", I built out a bit of functionality that will show up in 4.0.1. There is now an "Archive" button atop the Mass Update form at the bottom of the "My Inbox" view.

Your user goes through, selecting all the relevant emails, and then hits that button - the selected email are mass assigned an "Archived" status. Yes, you could have done this before, but there is a bit of SQL tweaking for that view that will now filter out items that have a status of "Archived"

I hope this will address your concerns - but in the mean time, tell your users NOT to mass delete items in their mailboxes. That is effectively the same as if you went through and deleted every item in the Case's history

.

I'll also be adding this to the I-E Daily Use FAQ in the Help forums.

Thanks for notifying us of this issue!

**ricvil** · 2006-01-10, 02:23 AM

Hi Chris,

This certainly is a possible solution, but ultimately it would be best if there was a check that automatically archived any emails that belonged to any Case History. That essentially eliminates the "human errror" element of not archiving emails manually. I can just picture one of my techs saying "Oops I forgot to Archive some Emails...".

Can this be done?

Thanks,
Ricardo

**sugarchris** · 2006-01-10, 02:39 AM

Hi rcivil,

The automatic archiving of emails is a job that I'd leave to Workflow. It was specifically designed to handle situations like this. What you're asking for is (I believe) too specific a use-case to build out functionality. I know there would be other organizations that would scream bloody murder if emails were auto-archived when a Case was marked closed.

The best I can do for you at this point has been implemented. If you require serious customizations, I'd recommend calling our Pro Services team or putting an ad in the Classifieds section.

Again, thanks for pointing out the issue!