Got IDC set up for a customer and they want to use the email input client to dump invoices in. Problem is, the email client doesn’t mark the emails as read once they get imported (which it is supposed to do according to documentation), so the PDF attachments just keep getting imported over and over again.
There is no apparent setting to toggle this. Anyone seen this before?
Are you using the “new” Outlook as a client? We noticed this same issue at the end of last week when using the new Outlook.
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FWIW, I gave up on the email client as we have just had too many problems with it, and frankly we needed better control than we could get with it. We now use workato to read the emails and move the attachments to a folder on the network and use the IDC input client. That’s been more reliable for us. (Although it’s not “free” because you need another system to read your emails, but we already have workato)
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Do you actually need a desktop client installed? Customer IT made a mailbox but it’s just Outlook on the Web. We were able to connect to it just fine, so we assumed Outlook Desktop wasn’t needed.
However that might be the issue, so it’s worth a try.
Secondary question - customer IT has IMAP off across the site. We had to use GraphAPI as the connection method - could this be the issue?
Hopefully it won’t come to that - it’s a dedicated email for invoices so hopefully lack of control won’t be an issue. As long as I can get the thing to mark them as read it’ll be perfect
Yeah, it depends on how how are getting things sent there, and how much you have going through. We have all of our vendors send in invoices, so we get some weird things that IDC can’t handle. So we have to do things like check if there are added attachments that IDC can’t handle (like excel) or something dumb that we have to make sure someone looks at. We have too many to manually put eyes on each e-mail.
From what I recall, there is a setting in the config files to filter only certain types of files to be brought in, such as PDFs.
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That’s not the problem (all the attachments will be PDF) its that the client isn’t marking the email as read when it imports, so the same thing gets reimported again and again
I was replying to @Banderson’s post about the different file formats being pulled in, such as Excel.
To your point, I believe I had experienced the issue with Outlook not updating emails in general as read or unread. This was happening months ago and has since been ok, but I am not certain of the cause or the solution. From what I’ve been able to find, it is a somewhat common issue and does seem to be related to New Outlook.
Oh my bad
Maybe that’s the missing link - we aren’t using the Outlook Desktop application at all, just web. I’ll suggest their IT download the classic version and see if it makes any difference
If your company uses an on prem exchange server, use the other email connection method EWS (not IMAP). At least from my experience the Graphiapi will only work for Office365.
We use a shared mailbox where all invoices go, and our folks weed out the trash emails that inevitably show up before moving the invoices to be processed to a subfolder (that allows us to utilize multi-company as well). It’s not headless and/or automated, but there are so many invoices that need pre-screening before IDC should even see them - which makes this setup work very well for us.
@Banderson in the beginning, we just let IDC pick up everything and OMG did we get some trash in the batches - even with attachment file type filtering. I like your idea of Workato.
@ballisticks What we noticed just last week, is that one user who uses the Old Outlook (full client installed on PC) can move those invoices and they get consumed and marked “read”, but the users who uses the New outlook client (not the web-only client) and moves the invoices to be consumed - those invoices are never marked as “read”. We’ve not tried the web-only client yet.
I shouldn’t think so, since all the real exchange of info/attachemtns is done via Exchange (IDC conencts directly, not via a local client)
Valid question - and I don’t know the correct answer.
My gut tells me that it’s the way the new outlook client is marking them as ‘synched’ or ‘moved’ or something, that is messing with how the IDC client is marking them as “read”. It’s a stretch, but it is what it is until we get it figured out or narrowed down to apsecific reason.
It’s not that. It’s that if there are other files types, they are usually sent for a reason, and someone needs to look at them. You wouldn’t know that unless you go through all of the emails. So I use that as a clue that this shouldn’t be automated because there is probably some other relevant data not on the invoice that needs to be looked at. So I sort the emails to different folders depending on what needs to be done with it. I could use the email input process and this sorting process together, but the email input has given us problems in the past (it would just stop working, and not import anything and someone would have to notice and we would have to restart the service, or it would mark emails as read, but not import the files). So since I was using Workato for processing some logic, I figured I could just make folders and drop the files in there and then use the file import process instead, and that has proven to be more stable for us.
Just an FYI – As of the end of 2022, the IDC E-mail Client only processed PDFs and maybe TIFFs (I can’t remember), but definitely not Excel files, Word docs, or even simple Text files.
The totally separate ECM E-mail Client, on the other hand, processed all types of file attachments, including Excel files & Word docs.
Not sure if the IDC E-mail Client has changed much since the end of 2022. If it has, I apologize for this bit of history.
That’s true that ECM can import the files. However, it can’t really read them as the OCR engine in ECM is very rudimentary and only really viable for identical documents. So that doesn’t really help in getting the files to IDC to do the OCR and read the invoices.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you are saying, which is entirely possible.
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@Banderson - Yes, I’m in full agreement with you. I wasn’t suggesting the ECM E-mail Client for processing non-PDFs for automated OCR scan. I just wanted to clear up some possible misunderstandings that others may have had about how the IDC E-mail Client works. Good luck!