Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
You can condition on the subject line, and it is less reliable than it looks. Two better options first.
How to do it
Use a condition on the subject containing certain words. Straightforward to build.
Why it disappoints
- Customers do not use your words. A rule looking for "invoice" misses "bill", "payment" and "factuur".
- Replies carry the old subject. Re: threads keep matching long after the conversation moved on.
- Automated mail contains anything. A rule on "urgent" fires on every marketing email that reaches your inbox.
- It matches partial words. Looking for "bill" also matches a customer called Bill.
What to do instead
Ask on the form. A category field gives you a controlled value that means what it says. If the ticket came through your help centre, you already have this.
Use intelligent triage. Where you have it, it classifies by intent rather than by keyword, which is what you were actually trying to do.
When subject matching is fine
Exact machine-generated text. A monitoring system that always sends "ALERT: disk full" can be matched reliably, because the sender is a machine and the wording is fixed.
That is the honest boundary: machine text yes, human text no.
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