Users can submit feedback to an ideas portal by navigating to the portal itself and completing your idea creation form. This is a great way to ensure that you collect the exact information you need and encourage your users to interact with you, the portal, and (if structured this way) with the other users and ideas on it.
However, emailed ideas are just as valuable to you. If you allow your portal users to create ideas by email, you give them an option that is quick and simple — encouraging painless feedback submission and welcoming them into your portal community at the same time.
When a user submits an idea by email, they are automatically created as a portal user in your account. Because ideas portal users are free and unlimited in every Aha! Roadmaps billing plan, you can invite or import as many users as you want.
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Emailed ideas
Users can create their ideas by email. You can find the email address they need to send their ideas to by navigating to Settings ⚙️→ Workspace → Ideas → Configure. From there, look at the Ideas via email field.
When a user sends an email to that address:
The email's subject will become the idea's Summary.
The email's body will become the idea's Description.
The email's from: email address will become the Creator (and display in the Creator field unless you have anonymized ideas in your portal). The sender will receive a confirmation email when their idea has posted to the portal.
Reasons to avoid forwarding an email address to your portal
Though it might be tempting, we do not recommend that you create an email address that forwards to the unique address you see in Ideas via email. It creates a security vulnerability in the following situation:
A corporate email address, such as ideas@example.com, has messages forwarded to an Ideas via email address.
New ideas submitted to the portal are set to be visible automatically.
Internal applications are used that allow self-registration of users with email addresses on the corporate domain.
If those conditions exist, you risk the following:
A malicious user registers for internal applications using the ideas@example.com email address.
A registration email is then sent to ideas@example.com.
The registration email gets published as an idea through the Ideas via email forwarding. The malicious user views the registration idea and uses the idea to access the registration content to create their account on the internal application.
If an address on your domain is used for idea submission, you should take caution to ensure that your portal is either a submit-only portal or that you set your default idea visibility to be Not visible for every user type, so that no malicious email could populate into the portal automatically.
Enable the ideas portal spam filter
Idea portals can represent a public face for your teams and your brands — but emailed submissions introduce the potential for spam submissions. The spam filter addresses this problem.
To do this, you will need to open your ideas portal settings. Navigate to Settings ⚙️→ Account → Ideas portals or Ideas → Overview. You will need to be an administrator with customizations permissions to configure an ideas portal.
From your account settings, click the name of the ideas portal whose settings you wish to edit.
From Ideas → Overview, click the Pencil icon by the name of the ideas portal whose settings you wish to edit.
Once your ideas portal settings are open, navigate to Overview → General. Check the box by Enable spam filter. Once enabled, the spam filter will scan all new ideas and public comments.
Manage ideas portal spam
To review items marked as spam, navigate to Settings ⚙️→ Account → Ideas portals, then hover over the name of an ideas portal with the spam filter enabled and click View spam.
From here, you can view items marked as spam for ideas or public comments.
Click the link in the first column to view the record in question.
Click the link in the User column to view the user's profile.
Hover over an item to mark it as Not spam or to Delete it.
All ideas and idea comments marked as spam will be automatically deleted 30 days after they were created.
To mark an idea or comment as spam that the spam filter missed, open the idea's detail drawer, click the More options menu, then click Mark as spam.
Not every idea or idea comment will show the option to Mark as spam in the More options menu. For example, ideas submitted by users in your Aha! Roadmaps account cannot be marked as spam.
We recommend that you do not delete ideas or comments if you feel they are spam — mark them as spam. The Aha! Roadmaps spam filters have two levels of learning: local and global. Local learning is taught by the ideas portal owners and occurs whenever something is marked as spam that is not spam and when something is marked as Not spam and Aha! Roadmaps thinks it is.
Do not mark unwanted ideas or comments as spam. Manage these ideas through your processes and workflows or simply delete these as appropriate.