[rt-users] problem: new ticket created on every mail if CC'ed to RT

[Bruce Campbell]

On 1 Feb 2002, Toni Willberg wrote:

> Sometimes a user in our company sends mail that has headers like:
>
>  To: someuser at company
>  Cc: rt at company       (this is being aliased to RT)
>
> A ticket is created with correct ticket id and everything looks fine.
>
> But now when that <someuser at company> replies to the mail he got from
> original user he uses [reply to all] thus using "Cc: rt at company" in
> mail. RT kindly creates a new request and ticket number for that mail
> and sends autoreply to that person.

RT is working correctly.  The method by which RT adds correspondence to an
existing ticket is by the ticket token in the subject line.

If someuser at company replies to the copy that they received themselves, RT
has no tracking information.  If someuser at company replies to the copy that
they received via RT, RT will then have it's normal tracking information.

This is really a user education issue in getting them to reply to the copy
with the RT tracking information.

On methods of getting RT to magically know that something without it's
tracking information should go in an existing ticket would be for
rt-mailgate to have the following logic:

	Does the message have my tracking info in the subject line?

		No.  Does it have an 'In-Reply-To' or similar field?

			Yes.  Is the Message-Id in this field a match for
			any Message-Id stored in the Attachments database?

				Yes.  Load Ticket, chastise user for not
				including RT tracking information.

				No.

			No.

		Yes.  Load ticket

	Do we have a Ticket?

		No.  Create Ticket.

	Do we have a Ticket?

		Yes, add correspondence.

		No.  Panic.

	end.


This has a few gotchas of course, particularly when some intentionally
removes the RT tracking information in order to get RT to create another
ticket (eg, the reply is actually on another matter)

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