Shared Mailbox - How to separate ongoing conversations from new enquiries

[PeterK]

Apologies in advance – English is not my first language. I hope this all makes sense. 😊

We have 4 teams that are sharing one mailbox – let’s call it InfoSec@ mailbox. The teams are:
<Policy Team>
<Incident Team>
<Project Team>
<Business Engagement team>

We receive around 30-40 emails daily with different enquiries from users/other departments. All emails end up in the Inbox folder, and the biggest problem is that I have to go through all emails to find out which email is actually addressed to my team. – i.e. general questions like: “Hi, where can I find encryption policy?” should be answered by the Policy Team, not Project Team)

The plan is that every team will have their own subfolder in the InfoSec@ mailbox and all enquiries will be automatically assigned to the right team (email will be moved to the right team subfolder).
My idea was to use “send email with option” so whenever a new email is sent to InfoSec@, MS Flow will reply back asking a user to specify to which team this email should be assigned to. i.e.

Thank you for your inquiry… blah blah blah blah …specify to which team this email should be assigned:
(Four buttons) <Policy Team>  <Incident Team>  <Project Team>  <Business Engagement team>

This was relatively easy to build but there is a small problem with this solution:

1) Let’s say user sent the following email to InfoSec@: “Hi, where I can find a password policy?”.
Next, MS Flow will automatically send a message asking to which team this message should be assigned to.
2) User choose: Policy Team
3) Email from a user is moved from the Inbox folder to the Policy Team folder.
4) Someone from Policy Team replied back from the InfoSec@ shared mailbox saying: Here is a link to the policy, let us know if you need anything else.”
5) Next, the user replied back: “Thank, also can you tell me where to find XYZ policy?

The issue is that my Flow does not recognise that second message is a part of an ongoing conversation between the Policy Team and a user so instead of moving the second email (re XYZ policy) automatically to the “Policy Team” subfolder, Flow will ask the user again where to assigned this email.  This is not a practical solution and will definitely annoy users.

I was thinking about “tagging” emails by changing email Subject or email Body by adding i.e. adding *PT once the email has been allocated to the Policy Team (*PT for Policy Team, *IT for Incident Team, *PT for Project Team etc.) and then add additional function on the top of my Flow that will check if Subject/Body of incoming emails contain one of the tags so by doing this I can segregate new inquiries from on-going conversations.
As far as I know, it is not possible to change a Subject or Body of the email…

Is anybody trying to achieve something similar? Maybe someone can offer an alternative solution?
By the way – creating four separate mailboxes is not an option here. 😊

[efialttes]

@PeterK Can you store Conversation id plus Team assigned in an external database, so everytime you receive a new email you check there if conversation id was already registered (i.e. a Team has already been assigned) or not (i.e. you shall ask for Team Assignment)?
Hope this helps

[PeterK]

By Conversation id you meant Messageid?

I was thinking about tracking message id but as far as I know, it changes whenever you do something with the email (i.e. move to a different folder, reply to email etc.). Also, I don't want to build an external database - this sounds like a big project that I would have to invest a lot of time to build this. Also, this would be difficult to build as I'm working in a corporate environment and projects like this needs to go through the long and complex approval process. 

[efialttes]

Hi! 

I mean this. Haven't tested myself, not sure if it correlates all messages in the thread

Hope this helps