[rt-users] Strategy for users who like to send mail to RT and CC: lots of folks

[Josh England]

We had the exact same situation and got around it by intercepting
messages before they go through rt-mailgate.

The scenario is exactly as you describe:
Original message is sent to RT with several recipients in the CC line.
One of the CC'ed recipients does a reply all -- new ticket is created.

So, with any ticket that comes in, we basically search for all tickets
with the same subject line, and then check the email headers for a
matching Message-ID header.  If the header is the same, we assume it is
part of the same thread and associate that email with the existing
ticket.  That way any CC'ed recipients responses are associated with the
original ticket because of the matching Message-ID.  Hope that made
sense.

I've included the script that we use.  It does a couple other things
too.  You have to change your procmail aliases to send mail through this
script, which then passes stuff through the regular rt-mailgate.

-JE

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 13:41 -0500, Fran Fabrizio wrote:
> We have a handful of users who like to send mail to our RT helpdesk and
> at the same time CC: lots of other folks.  RT does a great job of adding
> the CC's to the ticket - but the problem is that users typically do a
> Reply All to the original email, which send another email into the
> helpdesk and opens a new ticket.  Wash, rinse, repeat five times and
> your ticket queue is clogged with a bunch of tickets on the same issue.
> 
> Is there a strategy that people have found works for them?  I was
> thinking of just rejecting emails sent to the helpdesk that have also
> CC:ed someone else, but that doesn't seem very polite now does it?  :-) 
> I may be dreaming but maybe a plugin or similar for RT exists such that
> it would recognize an email as being part of the same email thread for
> which a ticket was already created?  Sounds too fancy but cool.  Anyway,
> other than better user brainwashing to not do this, are there some
> strategies I might employ to help here?
> 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: rt-mail
Type: application/x-perl
Size: 4675 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/rt-users/attachments/20070404/b8ffd81a/attachment.bin>