Documentation
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INDEX

Documentation Library

Search for information on Hornbill Documentation.

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Have questions about this site?

What is this site?

  • This website is Hornbill's new product documentation website and is currently under development.
  • It is intended that all existing and future public-facing documentation we produce will be available to search, browse and share.
  • Hornbill's current documentation is available at Hornbill Wiki but over time this content will be migrated to this documentation site.
  • Please feel free to have a look around at any time.

Why has Hornbill created this site?

  • Hornbill's products have moved on considerably since we introduced it almost 10 years ago. At the time, the MediaWiki tool was sufficient, but we have outgrown it.
  • Our customers are more enterprise focused and more self-sufficient than ever before, so for 2023 and beyond we have established a new documentation platform and team to drive our documentation initiative forwards.
  • We are aiming to deprecate the use of Hornbill Wiki for most Hornbill related documentation.
  • We want to enable our growing partner network with product resources and information, documentation beyond our Wiki approach is required.
  • We could definitely do with some help, and may even pay for some! If you have domain knowledge and would like to help, please check out our Hornbill Docs Contributor Guide and contact the Hornbill docs team at docs@hornbill.com.

What will this site be good for?

  • Community contribution will be facilitated, encouraged, and most welcome.
  • High quality documentation, will be kept up to date as rapidly as our products evolve.
  • Real-time content search and discovery.
  • Articles organized into books, books into libraries, creating a more natural and logical structure to our documentation.
  • Legacy API documentation and various other documentation sources will all be consolidated into a single unified documentation system.
  • Documentation available in browser as well as printable/viewable as PDF on demand.
  • Personalized documentation experience, allowing dark/light mode, article subscriptions, social media sharing and other useful features.
  • Almost all publicly available documentation on docs.hornbill.com will be open-source and available to fork on GitHub, allowing customers to derive their own custom documentation around Hornbill products should they wish to.

What is the timeline for this site?

  • We have taken the decision to publish and make available early, there is very little content at this time.
  • As and when we have completed/usable documentation, it will be published here.
  • We have a host of additional features we wish to add over time, so please watch this space.
  • We expect most of our existing documentation should be reviewed/migrated to docs.hornbill.com over the coming months.
  • The documentation project will be ongoing, will continue to expand, evolve and improve day-by-day.

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More...

Inbound Routing Rules

The Routing Rules provide a way of automating the delivery and triggering automated actions that occur on receipt of an email received into Hornbill. When an email is received, and a matching rule is found, the rule can perform an action, essentially allowing you to hook the mail router and perform a more customized action. This may be simply redirecting the email message to a particular shared mailbox and/or a folder, or triggering more advanced email routing rule extensions that are provided by the different Hornbill applications.

Before You Begin

  • You should be generally familiar with the way an email flows through Hornbill, in particular the shared mailbox functionality.
  • At least one Shared Mailbox needs to be setup.
  • Be familiar with ExpressLogic Expressions.

Routing Rule List

Switching On or Off

At the top of the list, a toggle button is provided to turn the Routing Rules on or off. This setting applies to all rules in this list. For any rules to be processed, this option must be set to ON.

On/Off Toggle

Creating a Rule

Clicking on the + in the toolbar will allow you to create a new rule.

Ordering

Routing rules are processed in the order that they are listed, starting at the top. Once a rule is matched, the rule action is carried out, and then rule processing for this message completes.

Note

Only the first rule that matches the incoming message will be fired, this is why it is important that you have control over the order of the rules.

  • The order can be changed by dragging and dropping a rule to a different position.
  • If a rule doesn’t match it will then check the next rule in the list.
  • If no rules match, the email will be sent to the inbox of the Shared Mailbox that matches the To address.

Tip

If a rule matches, but its action fails to to execute, no further rules will be checked, and the rule’s fail action will be followed.

Deleting a Rule

The Delete option in the tool bar becomes available when one or more rules are selected in the list. Deleting a rule will permanently remove the rule.

Rule Expression Syntax

Each rule uses an expression to match information found within the email message being processed. Information from the email message is made accessible to the expression processor as variables. For convenience, these variables are available in the editor when typing, you will see matching variable names being presented. You can also look up the variable names in the popup help next to the expression field.

Selecting any of these variables from the list by clicking or using the arrow keys, will insert that variable into the Rule Expression field.

The following table lists the available variables and their purpose: -

Variable Description
toAddress The email address(es) to which the message was sent.

If the email was sent to multiple recipients, this variable will contain a comma-separated list of all the addresses (e.g. support@hornbill.com, info@hornbill.com). When including the toAddress variable in an expression, the LIKE operator should be used. For example, the expression toAddress LIKE '%support@hornbill.com%' would match, even if there are multiple addresses.
toDomain The email domain(s) to which the message sent.

If the email was sent to multiple recipients, this variable will contain a comma-separated list of all the domains (e.g. hornbill.com, google.com). When including the toDomain variable in an expression, the LIKE operator should be used. For example, the expression toDomain LIKE '%hornbill.com%' would match, even if there are multiple domains.
ccAddress The CC email address(es) to which the message was sent.

If the email was sent to multiple CC recipients, this variable will contain a string of comma-separated addresses (e.g. support@hornbill.com, info@hornbill.com). When including the ccAddress variable in an expression, the LIKE operator should be used. For example, the expression ccAddress LIKE '%support@hornbill.com%' would match, even if there are multiple addresses.
ccDomain The CC email domain(s) to which the message was sent.

If the email was sent to multiple CC recipients, this variable will contain a string of comma-separated domains (e.g. hornbill.com, google.com). When including the ccDomain variable in an expression, the LIKE operator should be used. For example, the expressionccDomain LIKE '%hornbill.com%' would match, even if there are multiple domains.
fromAddress The full email address of the person who sent the message, for example joe.bloggs@hornbill.com
fromDomain The email domain of the person who sent the message, for example hornbill.com
subject The message subject text
body The message body text. If the message was sent as HTML, this will be a html-stripped text string.
mailbox The name of the mailbox on Hornbill to which the toAddress email was matched

Important

These variable names are case-sensitive when you reference them in your expressions.

Simple Example Expressions

Operator Example
LIKE subject LIKE ‘%abc’
subject LIKE ‘xyz%’
subject LIKE ‘%mno%’
NOT subject != ‘abc’
NOT IN subject NOT IN (‘abc’, ‘zyx’)
IN subject IN (‘abc’, ‘mno’, ‘xyx’)
= subject = ‘abcd’

ExpressLogic

Routing rules use Hornbill’s ExpressLogic Expression engine for evaluating the rule expressions. You can see a detailed ExpressLogic Reference Guide to learn more about the syntax, functions, and general expression capabilities used in Hornbill.

In addition to the standard helper functions made available by the ExpressLogic expression engine its self, the following additional email-specific functions are available to help with rule expressions.

Function Description
MESSAGE_HEADER Return the value of any email message header present in the email message being evaluated. If header is not present this will return NULL.

MESSAGE_HEADER('X-Header-Name')

For example:-

MESSAGE_HEADER('MessageID') LIKE '%hornbill.com%

Routing Rule Action

When a rule is triggered it can perform an action. The following actions are available for use

Action: Disabled

The rule is disabled and will not be processed, and no action will be triggered.

Action: Forward to Mailbox/Folder

You can control which mailbox and which folder the email message is delivered to. When you select this Action option, the following action-specific fields will be available: -

  • Mailbox: A drop down list of available shared mailboxes
  • Folder: Once a ‘mailbox’ is presented, this field will provide a drop-down list of folders available.

Action: Trigger Application Logic

You can trigger a specific function provided by any application that implements email routing rule custom logic to process the message in a way that is specific to that application. When this option is selected the following fields will be available: -

  • Application: A drop down list of applications that have Email Routing Rule actions defined
  • Operation: A dropdown list of available inbound routing rule functions available for the selected application
  • Target Folder Success: The specified folder to deliver the message to if the operation was successful (see note below about setting the folder name here).
  • Target Folder Failure: The specified folder to deliver the message to if the operation failed. (see note below about setting the folder name here).
  • Custom Field: The field called Resource is a field that is customized by different operations, this is not really describable here, you need to refer to the application-specific documentation for more details.
  • Mark as Read on Success: If enabled, this will mark the message as read if the FlowCode action completes successfully.

Note

Folder Names: The Trigger Application Logic action, at configuration time, does not know what the name of the target mailbox will be, the mailbox is determined at runtime based on the incoming email To address and the target mailbox that matches that address. For this reason, its not possible to select specific folders, instead you need to type in the name of the folder, and the system will resolve that name to the correct folder in the mailbox that will receive the message. If you leave this field blank, or, if the folder name you specify does not match a folder (an exact folder name match must occur), then the default target folder will be used. This means for successful processing the message will be moved to the Deleted Items folder, and for failed actions, the message will be delivered to the Inbox folder.

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