Mailbox Rule

The information in this section relates to a pre-release version of ContactsLaw and is not representative of the final product.

Mailbox rules provide a way to automate the selection of the document type and matter when uploading emails as documents to ContactsLaw.

Since the variety and semantics of messages are likely to vary from mailbox to mailbox, each member has their own set of rules. The rules are evaluated for every email that is uploaded; however, once the conditions of a given rule have been met, the remaining rules are skipped. Therefore, the order of rules may be significant.

Workgroup

Rules can be associated with a particular workgroup, which governs the available document types and fields on matters.

Conditions

Each rule has at least one condition, which matches one of the headers of an email (Subject, Sender, To, etc). Typically, this is matched against a keyword or phrase that uniquely identifies the type of document being uploaded.

When matching the sender or recipients, you can target either the email address or the name.

You can combine multiple conditions using Boolean logic ("AND" / "OR"). Adding more conditions will help to ensure that rules are specific and less likely to clash with each other.

Document Type

Every rule must specify the document type that will be assigned if its conditions are met.

Rules may also nominate a document type to assign to the attachments of the email. (Note that mailbox rules are still evaluated for nested emails, which may overrule the document type.)

Matter Lookup

ContactsLaw will already attempt to pre-fill the matter if the subject of the email contains a matter reference; however, rules can specify other ways to identify the matter. For example, by looking up the action number, client's reference or the value of a field.

In order to perform the lookup, a rule needs to include instructions for how to isolate ("find") the lookup value in the subject of the email. This is typically written as a regular expression. The expression can look for delimiters (e.g. square brackets), test whether it conforms to a particular structure, or some combination of both. If you need to transform ("replace") the result of the expression before the lookup is performed, you can specify this as well.

The lookup value must exactly match the property of the matter you are targeting; partial matches are ignored. Only matters in the same workgroup as the rule (or a child workgroup) can be matched by the lookup.