Overview
FogBugz Autosort works with Inquiries created from incoming mail only. Autosort will ignore cases manually created in the Inbox Project or incoming email that you have categorized differently. Autosort will come out of ‘training mode’, and automatically sort any incoming messages, once more than 15 emails have been moved out of the Undecided area into another non-spam area. The emails must be sorted within the same project. This article provides 6 tips to (almost) perfect email sorting.
Information
Six Tips to (Almost) Perfect Email Sorting
Make sure you are moving Inquiries out of Undecided, whether they are spam or not.
The spam filter’s decision process is trying to figure out not just whether something is spam or not, but where to put it other than Undecided. If you are closing cases in Undecided or changing them to a different category, then you are not training the filter with those cases. Autosort will only leave training mode and start sorting once you have moved 15 Inquiries out of Undecided and into an Area other than Spam.
Close Autosorted Inquiries in the project and area they are sorted into.
If you move the case out of the project, FogBugz Autosort loses track of it. This is due to different projects having their own Autosort rules, which do not translate well between projects.
Limit the number of Autosort areas to five or six per project.
This kind of sorting takes a lot of computational resources. Deciding between seven areas is about three times as intense as deciding between four areas. Fewer choices also give you better sorting.
Have an “Undeliverable” area
Bounces from email servers and out-of-office auto-replies will create new cases. Because they are so predictably structured, though, it is easy to get the sorter trained to sort these out into their area. We use “Undeliverable” because it sorts nicely to the bottom of the Inbox filter.
Turning on Autosort will create “Spam”, “Not Spam”, and “Undecided” areas.
If there are already areas with these names in the project, then Autosort may encounter errors. Be sure to rename any such areas before turning on Autosort for a project.
Add areas slowly and organically
Your first order of business should be to train spam vs. nonspam. Once you have mail reliably being sorted into Not Spam, you can add areas one by one to segment out certain types of mail. The more areas you have, the less accurate it will be. Also, it rarely works to send emails that you think will look like the emails you intend to receive. The signals that the sorter listens to go far beyond the actual text content of the email, so it is not worth your while to send 100 messages with your product name into the Inbox and sort them to “pre-train” the filter. Rather, just open it up and train it naturally. It will respond very quickly to things like web form submissions and auto-generated emails.
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