4.10. Ignores

Within Ignores there are three tabs: Ignores, Confidential Tags and Attachments.

Ignore rules instruct MME to ignore matching to records in Salesforce based on ignore rule criteria, specifically a designated email address or entire email domain.  The address or domain are considered in conjunction with the type of ignore and direction chosen.  When MME processes emails, an early step executed by the MME algorithm is to check Ignore rules.  Depending on the details of an ignore rule, a message can its status changed to Ignore and will not appear in the default view of the Activity Dashboard – All Activity Excluding Ignore.  However, by changing the View to All or Ignore and clicking Refresh, you can see emails that have been ignored.  You can also hover over the status “Ignore” in the Matched Records column and see why the message was ignored.  This can be helpful in troubleshooting incorrect Ignore rules.

All MME Users can create Personal ignore rules.  Administrators can also create ignore rules that apply to all active MME Users to 1) make sure they control which records are not to be matched and 2) save End Users time in not having to create their own version of the same ignore rule.

When an Admin views Ignores, they will see a list of all ignore rules that have been created for the account.  The last column “User to Apply To” will indicate if a rule was created by an Admin and is applied to all users or if an individual created a rule just for themselves.

During setup, our team would have recommended the creation of at least one ignore rule for your company’s internal domain.  This is a best practice and protective measure against unnecessary or unwanted matching of internal email to Salesforce.com records that contain employee email addresses.  Otherwise, confidential communication and/or clutter may end up in Salesforce records visible to all employees.

Ignore rules can be created to ignore matching based on a complete email address, such as jane@matchmyemail.com or can be created for just the domain.  Domain ignore rules have the advantage of blocking matching to any record in which the record’s email address contains that domain.  This can be useful when you don’t want to create an ignore rule for every specific employee of a company but can also be somewhat powerful and potentially block matching based on domain alone.  You can also specify the ignore type, direction, and if this is a personal rule or meant to apply to all Users.

Ignore Type is a very important choice.  There are two types of ignore rules available: “skip address” and “skip email containing address”.

The ignore type “skip address” means that MME will skip matching for just that address or domain.  This is useful if there is more than one email address in the email header.  The message will be processed for the other email addresses in the email header.  If all email addresses in the header are ‘covered’ by an ignore rule, then the message status becomes ‘Ignore’ and the email is not shown in the default cloud view of ‘All Excluding Ignore’.  However, if not all email addresses in the header are ‘covered’ by an ignore rule, then MME will either show a status of No Match or Match information, depending on if matches can be made to records in Salesforce.

The ignore type “skip email containing address” means that if the email address or domain is found in the email header, MME will skip the entire email for processing.  Thus, any other email address in the header will not be considered, even if they represent a match.  This is a more powerful type of ignore and it is important to apply it carefully.  The resulting status for this message will be “Ignore”.  A frequent use for this ignore type is to ignore spam, marketing, or email blast addresses.  Importantly, and a word of warning, if you create this type of ignore rule with a User’s email address or the company’s email domain, you can send all relevant emails to Ignore status and, in essence, keep MME from matching anything.

MME’s Youtube Channel has a playlist “Tutorial for New Users” with two videos on Ignore Rules. One goes into great depth about how they work and another explains where you go to create them.

 

Ignores > Confidential Tags

Only Administrative Users can create Confidential Tags.  This feature is different than ignores in that if conditions of a Confidential Tag rule are met, a message is purged from the MME account.  Remember, when a message is ignored, it will have the status of Ignore but still be accessible in the MME Activity Dashboard during the retention period by changing the View to All or Ignore.  A Confidential Tag rule results in a message no longer being available in the Activity Dashboard for purposes of troubleshooting, manual matching, etc.  Therefore, these should be crafted carefully so that messages desired for matching in Salesforce are not purged accidentally.

The fields for Confidential Tag and Address to Ignore can be used independently or in combination.  You can choose to specify a Confidential Tag and/or Address or leave one of these fields blank.  This means if you include a tag but leave the address blank, MME will purge an email based solely on the tag.  If you leave the tag field blank and enter an address or domain, then MME will purge an email based solely on the address or domain.  Using both of these fields in combination allows you to be more granular, only purging an email when an address AND a tag are present.

The guidelines for creating confidential tags are:

• Confidential Tag: You will want to choose an unusual word or short group of words that would not normally appear in typical correspondence by your Users.  Tags are not case sensitive and can include symbols or spaces.  Do not start a tag with “mme” as this can conflict with other app features.  If you leave the tag blank, all email in direction indicated with address entered will be discarded.  You can decide if we should look only in the subject, body, or both places for the presence of the tag.
• Address to Ignore: This field can contain either a full email address (username@domain.com) or just the email domain from which the confidential emails will be coming.  If you leave this blank, the system will apply tag to all imported emails.
• Direction of Address: If a domain or email address was entered in Address to Ignore, you can also determine if MME should purge the email when that domain or address is the sender (From), the recipient (To), or in either direction.
• User to Apply to: As with Ignore Rules, Administrative Users can create a Confidential Tag that can be global and apply to all active MME Users.  Choosing “myself” will make this rule only apply to you as the Administrative User signed in.  If you choose “all Users”, the rule will be working for all activated MME Users.

 

Ignores > Attachments

It is possible to Ignore Attachment syncing into Salesforce based on a limited set of criteria.  A use case for this might be if one particular User, based on their responsibilities, must send or receive lots of the same attachments that are not needed or wanted in Salesforce, taking up valuable storage.

This option can be found in the Match My Email Control Panel > Ignores > Attachments.  Click New and then specify criteria for attachments uploads to be ignored.  Multiple conditions can be created to consider the From or To (email direction) and the address or domain that is relevant.