[rt-users] reply to a Ticket results not in comment

[Eric Goodman]

At 10:08 AM +0200 6/26/2001, Norbert Schollum wrote:
>Hi there,
>in the manual it says, that replying to a
>message with the ticket-ID in the subject
>the mail will be handled as a comment.
>
>but with me it always becomes a Reply.
>in the history it says "mail sent by..."

It depends on the alias to which the message is sent. If the alias is 
of type "comment" then the email reply will be an RT comment. If the 
alias is of type "correspond" then the email reply will be an RT 
reply.

RT is set up so that the "public" address of a queue should be a 
"correspond" queue. Typically I think you maintain two separate 
aliases for each queue. Something like:

trouble          |"/<blah>/mailgate correspond queue"
trouble-internal |"/<blah>/mailgate comment queue"

Users would send trouble reports and followups to 
"trouble at yourhost.com". Replies from the support staff would by 
default go to "trouble at yourhost.com" as well, meaning it would be a 
reply. If a support tech wanted to send comments, they would go to 
"trouble-internal".

There are several differences in RT 1.x between comment and 
correspond queues other than who receives the mail that motivate 
using "correspond" quesus as the official address of a queue:

- correspond queues will create new tickets when receiving mail not 
associated with an open ticket, comment queues will not (I believe 
you just get an error).

- correspond queues will "open" a ticket for which it receives mail 
(e.g., if the ticket was marked "resolved" it will change the ticket 
status). Comment queues will add the comments to the ticket, but a 
resolved ticket stays closed.


Not having Jesse's experience with automated systems, I hacked RT to 
allow comment queues to create new tickets, and then published the 
"comment" queue address as the public address. This made sense to me 
because then most mail would remain "private" to the techs, and they 
could use email to comment on all the issues that arose. However, 
ticket opening is really important. Anytime you receive mail about a 
ticket from a user, you *always* want the ticket to open back up 
(even when it's a false alarm!) or else you can miss important 
messages like "I thought it was fixed but it really isn't".

It's okay for the techs to have an option one way or the other, but 
not for users.


--- Eric