[rt-devel] Using MessageId field in Attachments table

[Bruce Campbell]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Jesse Vincent wrote:

> This was exactly the use I'd imagined for the MessageId field, though
> the actual implementation never happened.  The thing to be careful of is
> that users often just reply to a message and clear the subject line and body
> when attemting to create a new ticket and may inadvertently get their
> new ticket attached to an existing ticket.

See, telepathy.

This could be avoided in 80% of cases by your merge code doing:

	Find referenced Message-Ids
	Compare subject lines
	If subject lines match (ignoring RT tags and Re:'s):
		Merge into ticket
	else
		No merge, leave as new ticket
	fi

It does become a matter of per-site user education, and issuing a caution
each time you do a judgement call based on message ids (eg, if No Merge,
use the autoreply template saying 'According to the mail headers, this
message was in reply to ticket #12345, but the automatic checks on subject
line and body seem to indicate that it is a seperate issue').

Regards,

-- 
                             Bruce Campbell                            RIPE
                   Systems/Network Engineer                             NCC
                 www.ripe.net - PGP562C8B1B                      Operations