An email did not become a job

Start here: nothing is thrown away

Every message that reaches us is recorded, including the ones that do not become jobs. When something is not turned into a work order, the reason is stored against it — it is never quietly deleted and it never simply vanishes.

That matters for the conversation you are probably in the middle of. "We emailed you, where is the job?" has an answer, and it is a specific one. If nothing on this page explains what happened, send us the date, the rough time and the address it was sent from and we can look that exact message up and tell you what became of it.

How long should it take?

• Your own WorkOrders address — yourfirm@jobs.workorders.nz — is immediate. Mail is handed straight to us, so the job appears within seconds of the email arriving.
• A mailbox you have connected is checked every five minutes. Anything up to five minutes is normal and is not a fault. If somebody is standing over you, that is the number to quote.

A mailbox that has just been connected and has a full inbox catches up in batches, so a large backlog takes a while to come through. That is working as intended, not stalling.

What never becomes a job, on purpose

Some mail is machines talking to machines, and turning it into work would mean somebody closing jobs all day that were never requests. These are recognised before a job is created, and each one is recorded with its reason.

• Bounces and delivery failures. The "your message could not be delivered" notice that comes back from a mail server. This one matters more than it looks: a bounce from one of our own status emails, made into a job, would send another email, which could bounce again.
• Out-of-office and other automatic replies. "I am on leave until the 14th" is not a request for work. Mail programs mark these as automatic, and we take them at their word — including the markers Outlook and Microsoft 365 use, which are the only sign an Exchange out-of-office gives.
• Mailing lists and bulk mail. Newsletters, supplier circulars, anything sent to a list rather than to you. If a message carries the marks of having gone out to a mailing list, or is flagged by its sender as bulk, it is not treated as a request.
• Mail from a no-reply@ sender. Nobody is at the other end of one of those, so even if it were a request, it is not one you could hold a conversation about.
• WorkOrders' own outbound mail, arriving back in. If a status email we sent ends up back in a mailbox you have connected — which happens more easily than you would think — we recognise it as ours rather than reading it in as a fresh request.
• Mail that has been relayed more than twenty-five times. That is a message going round in a circle between two forwarding rules. A real customer email crosses well under ten.

If the message you are looking for is one of these but you think it was genuinely a request, that is worth telling us about — the ones above are judgement calls we made once, and a real example is the only way to find out we got one wrong.

Junk mail

Mail arriving at your WorkOrders address is scored for junk before it reaches us, and anything scoring badly enough is stored rather than turned into a job.

That threshold is set deliberately generously, because a customer describing a burst pipe in capital letters with three photographs attached scores badly on every junk filter ever written, and a missed job costs far more than a junk row somebody closes. If a real request has been caught by it, tell us — that is worth knowing about.

Two of everything?

You should not get two. The same message arriving both at your WorkOrders address and through a mailbox you have connected makes one job, not two. Every email carries an identifier its sender's mail program gave it, and we remember the ones already seen for your company; the second copy is recognised and recorded as a duplicate rather than raised again.

Which is what makes forwarding safe. You can forward your existing inbox to your WorkOrders address and connect that same inbox, during a changeover or permanently, without anyone closing duplicates all week.

Two different emails about the same problem are a different matter, and they do make two jobs — because they are two messages, and there is no safe way to tell "same job" from "same customer, second fault". A reply to one of our own status emails, though, lands on the job it is about rather than starting a new one.

A connected mailbox that has stopped

Connections stop eventually: a password is revoked during a tidy-up, two-step verification gets switched off, or the account is rebuilt. When it happens you do not have to notice it yourself.

• The mailbox is marked as needing attention on Settings → Mailboxes, with the mail server's own words shown next to it, so you can see what it actually objected to.
• Everyone in the firm who is an owner or an administrator gets an email saying so.
• Nothing is lost. The messages stay sitting in the mailbox untouched, and they are read in on the first check after you reconnect. There is no gap to go back and fill in by hand.

Reconnecting is a matter of creating a fresh password for the mailbox and pasting it in — see connecting a Gmail mailbox for the steps, which are the same shape whoever your provider is.

The usual questions

Still stuck? Get in touch with the date, the time and the address the message was sent from, and we will find it. And if you are weighing up how requests should reach you in the first place, how work gets into WorkOrders lays out the four routes and their trade-offs.