Inbound mail & unmatched triage

PRA Center gives each request its own intake address and puts it on the letters it sends, so an agency that simply hits reply lands back on the right request. The address is shown on the request under “Reply-to”, with a button to copy it — hand it to a custodian who asks where to send things.

Replies thread onto the request’s activity feed alongside your letters and notes, so the whole back-and-forth stays in one place.

Custodians often reply from a personal work address, or compose a fresh message instead of replying. PRA Center tries in order: the request’s own intake address, then whether the sender is an address already known for that agency, then whether the sender’s domain matches the agency’s filing domain — and only threads on a domain match when exactly one open request could be meant.

Common webmail domains are never used to identify an agency, so a custodian writing from a personal account is not guessed at.

Records that arrive attached to a reply are stored with the request. A message can carry up to 20 attachments, each up to 25 MB. Anything over the limit is not stored, and the request tells you which files were skipped rather than quietly dropping them.

Mail that can’t be placed is captured rather than lost, and waits under “Unmatched mail” for an admin. Each message shows who it came from, when it arrived, and a preview of what it says. There are two things you can do with it:

• Associate it with a request — the message threads onto that request’s record.
• Discard it — the message is resolved without threading, and the captured message stays as evidence.

Associating is permanent. The correspondence record only gains entries, so a message cannot be moved to a different request afterwards — the queue asks you to confirm before it commits.

When you associate a message, PRA Center records that sender’s address for that agency, so the next message from the same person threads on its own. Over time an agency’s real correspondents get recognized without anyone triaging them.

Personal webmail addresses are never learned this way, and neither is a sender PRA Center could not read. What has been learned isn’t listed anywhere in the app today — if an address was learned in error, contact support.