Filter by message content plug-in – Linked Helper

General information

Filter by message content is a plugin that prevent message sending in the event that a certain phrase or phrases that match a regular expression were found in one of the previous messages.

To enable it please:

Navigate to the Plug-in Store menu.
Find Filter by message content plug-in and click Install button:
Once plug-in is installed, Filter can be found in the Advanced settings tab of the Message to 1st connections, Message to event attendees, and Message to group members, actions:

Use case

A customer who started using Linked Helper usually tends to automate and scale the routine of sending messages to 1st degree connections or to group members / event attendees. The only obstacle which may occur is that they won't have a list of profiles with whom conversation is already in progress or who have already received the manual message which is going to be automated. As a result, finding and excluding such profiles may defeat the benefit of automation. Using “Filtering message content” will allow a customer to detect whether the profile has already received a certain phrase and stop messaging that profile further.

Detailed description

You can see several filters there. The Reject if any of previous messages sent by filter is used to indicate the sender of the content that needs to be found in the messaging history.

If you choose the You (1) option, it means that Linked Helper 2 then searches your message that contains a certain phrase or expression.
If you choose the Contact (2) option, then it means that Linked Helper 2 searches a recipient's message that contains a certain phrase or expression.
If you choose the Any of you (3) option, then Linked Helper 2 searches a certain phrase or expression in the messages both from you and your recipients.

How To

Contains filter is used for inserting the needed phrase or expression that needs to be found in the message history. Let's see how this filter works in more detail:

At least one phrase [OR]

When this option is enabled, Linked Helper searches for any of the phrases in the whole messaging history (no matter what switch is chosen: You/Contact/Any of you).

If you want to skip sending a message to those who have already received your message containing one phrase "how are you", you need to set the action up as it is shown in the screenshot below:

If you want to skip sending a message to those who have already received a message from you containing any of the two (or any of the X) phrases, in the example below that will be either "Goodbye" or "Have a nice day", you need to set the action up as it is shown in the screenshot below:

You need to click the Add phrase button to add an additional field for inserting another phrase.

All phrases [AND]

When this option is enabled, Linked Helper searches the whole messaging history BUT triggers only when all the phrases are within one message. For example, if you use All phrases [AND] filter and insert one phrase that was sent by you and another phrase was sent by your recipient, then your message won't be skipped, it will be sent anyway even if you have the "Any of you" switch enabled because the "All phrases [AND]" checks for phrases only in one message (either sent by you or your recipient, according to your settings).

If you want to skip sending a message to contacts who have already sent you a message containing several phrases in one of their messages like "bye" and "thank you", then you need to set the action up as it is shown in the screenshot below:

You need to click the Add phrase button to add an additional field for inserting another phrase.

Regular expression

A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; also referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern. Usually, such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. In our case, they can be used to find certain patterns in messaging history and reject profiles if a pattern is found.

Linked Helper 2 uses regex in accordance with Javascript ES6 regular expressions. You can learn more about regular expressions on Wikipedia or this page.

Detect any message

One of the most popular use cases is to check whether any messages were sent either from or to the lead in the past, including one-character messages, emojis, etc.

With the .* used as a regular expression, Linked Helper check the messaging history with a profile and stop messaging if an emoji or any character (a line of text of any length) is found, meaning there was a chat with the profile:

Detect sent email address

A use case can be as follows: let's imagine I have 3 000 1st-degree connections and some of them do not have their email address in the Contact section of their LinkedIn page. Prior to using Linked Helper 2, I created a list of such profiles and requested emails from them manually but didn't have time to check who sent me an email and who didn't. Now I'd like to get a list of those who sent me an email address and send a reminder to those who didn't. So now I need to create a campaign for sending a reminder message, upload the list into Linked Helper and adjust the Advanced settings of the message with a regular expression in such a way so that reminder will not be sent to those from whom I received any email address.

Here is the regex I need to use (it was taken from this answer in Stackoverflow, but you may consider finding a more or a less complex example that suits your needs since the one below, for example, do not recognize email in national characters like иван.сергеев@пример.рф or 用户@例子.广告):

(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\[(?:(?:(2(5[0-5]|[0-4][0-9])|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9]))\.){3}(?:(2(5[0-5]|[0-4][0-9])|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\])

With this setting and regular expression, Linked Helper will search for email addresses and if you receive one from the profile, Linked Helper won't send a reminder to such person:

Detect a sentence

Another use case is when you want to skip profiles to whom you already sent a certain phrase manually, but you're not quite sure what exact phrase you used. Let's take the same example with email addresses mentioned above: I have a list of 1st-degree connections without emails in their contact details, but I do not know to whom you already sent a request for email and to whom didn't. Moreover, I am not sure the phrase was always the same, there could have been variations, e.g.:

Please, send me your personal email address.
Send your work email and I will then send you the offer.
Once you send me your work email address, I will reply with the offer there.
After you send your personal email address, you will receive my offer via email.
I would like you to send a work email address in reply to this message.

Now I'd like to send a request for the email to those who did not receive it. In such a case, I can easily reject profiles who receive any of the message above (its certain part, to be more exact), with this regular expression:

send (me\s)*(your|a) (personal|work) email

You can easily check your regex and just it if needed using this or similar web services:

As you can guess, with this setting enabled, Linked Helper will not send a message if it finds any of the phrases that contains an expression that matches the pattern of regex.

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