---
title: Automatic behaviour
description: What happens without anybody acting — including the important negatives.
sidebar:
  label: Automatic
  order: 6
---

What happens without anybody acting. This is the material operations teams are
most often unaware of, so it is stated in full.

## Triggered by mail arriving

Mail sync is Graph delta on each enrolled mailbox. One mail process holds the
cursor; it is not a button on a board.

| What happens | When | What the business notices |
| --- | --- | --- |
| A conversation is created or joined | Every new message | The inbox grows; a thread's message list grows |
| The message is typed | Every new message | Enquiry, PO, acknowledgement, revision, or other. A hand-corrected type is left alone |
| The message is judged for technical impact | Every new message | A "please send a drawing" reply does not re-process; a revised pressure does |
| Job references are pulled out | Every new message | Related conversations attach to the same opportunity |
| The original sender is recovered | Every new message | The customer, not the colleague who forwarded |
| Customer resolved | Origin email against party contacts | Unknown sender becomes a review item, not a lead against staff |
| A closed conversation is reopened | New mail on a closed thread | Work someone had finished with reappears |
| Attachments are saved and queued | Messages with files | Documents appear, marked as waiting |
| Files inside a forwarded mail are lifted out | A forward | The customer's datasheets, not just the covering note |

## Triggered by processing

| What happens | When |
| --- | --- |
| Documents are read before anything else | Any run, if any are waiting |
| Line items are saved before parameters are extracted | Every run — progress survives a reload |
| Fluid properties are filled in | Every line item |
| Steam properties are derived from pressure | A steam duty |
| Ambient conditions are assumed | Only where the enquiry states neither, and never for steam or a stated gas |
| Values that cannot be what they claim to be are withheld | A length in a pressure or temperature slot |
| Dropped sizes are flagged | A bore in the source that no line captured |
| Products are suggested | Every line item |
| A half-specified duty is completed from published tables | Bore or flow stated but not both |

## Triggered by opening a quotation

The quotation is rebuilt from scratch on every view. Only the person's
overrides and header are stored, so a corrected product record or a fixed rule
reaches every existing draft. Staleness is recalculated if the enquiry was
re-read since.

## Triggered by a purchase order

Lines are extracted, keyed, and compared to the current quotation. Differences
are held for review. Nothing silently accepts a mismatch.

## What does not happen by itself

- **Nothing is guessed into a customer.** An unknown sender is a review item.
- **Nothing is merged silently.** Uncertainty is routed to a person.
- **A failed document is never retried automatically.**
- **A closed conversation is not processed** until new mail reopens it.
- **ERP handoff is not fire-and-forget.** The queue retries against the order
  row; the message on the wire is not the source of truth.

See [Collecting mail](/business/workflows/collecting-mail) and
[Business rules](/business/business-rules).