Salesforce Cases and Exchange 2010

I have to admit I am quite a fan of Exchange 2010. There is so much more functionality compared to 2003. One feature that I have worked on recently is transport rules to conditionally forward emails sent to a support department. Since Exchange 2010 can handle Regular Expressions it is possible to filter on Salesforce Case ID’s. If an email comes in or goes out with a case reference in the body of the email that matches the regular expression then it is forwarded to the case to email address Salesforce supply. This way we have an automated way of recording all case correspondence within Salesforce. The emails are simply saved as part of the case and therefore you have a central place to find all the correspondence. The regex you need is:

(ref:)\w\w\w\w\w\w\w(.)\w\w\w\w\w\w\w\w\w(:ref)

I have since found out that the first 7 characters are your unique organisation reference in salesforce. I have included the ref: :ref into the regex to further cut down any chance of a “false positive” if another system that sends emails uses a similar structure. A booking reference for example.