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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T02:22:46+00:00

I’m writing a Windows service that will poll my IMAP4 inbox for emails from

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I’m writing a Windows service that will poll my IMAP4 inbox for emails from clients and create new Cases in Salesforce based on them.

Sometimes emails come in with a Case reference code in the subject. Ex: “[ ref:00FFwxyz.500FFJJS5:ref ]”. I’d like to assign such emails to the existing Case identified by the code rather than create a new one.

My questions is: Is there a definitive formula for extracting a unique Case identifier from the ref code? I’ve seen a few formulas that do the reverse, but they all look like guesswork: Blog post on KnowThyCloud.com, Force.com Discussion Board thread.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Found a decent enough solution. I was wrong in calling the post on KnowThyCloud.com guesswork. In the right context it works fine.

    My solution is to create a new custom field on the Case record of type “Formula (Text)”. The field’s value is the formula mentioned in the blog post: 

    TRIM(" [ ref:" + LEFT( $Organization.Id, 4) + RIGHT($Organization.Id, 4) +"."+ LEFT( Id, 4) + SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(Id, RIGHT( Id, 4), ""), LEFT( Id, 4), ""), "0", "") + RIGHT( Id, 4) + ":ref ] ")

    Now the value of the custom field for each Case record is the same as the reference Id in emails and I can simply query for it with the Salesforce API.

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