[rt-users] Making RT invisible - changing subject lines

[Jesse Vincent]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 03:47:54PM -0500, Tony Aiuto wrote:
> My guess is that rt-mailgate could be beefed up to look at
> the 'In-Reply-To' (and maybe Message-ID) headers when it can't
> parse the ticket id off the subject line.   Most decent
> MUAs should preserve enough info to work

"Most" "decent"

I've actually pondered this in the past. I even almost implemented it.
But I've become more and more convinced that it will result in the
wrong thing happening often enough to become a major pain in the ass.

> There could be many problems.   For example, a customer
> who never actually creates a new message when submitting a
> ticket, but rather replies to an old, dead ticket and replaces
> the subject.   That works in RT as designed, but would break
> with the In-Reply-To parsing.

Also, don't forget all those mail clients which don't include
refers-to or in-reply-to headers, like /bin/mail and SMS gateways.

 
> What does Jesse think?
 
Jesse thinks that transparent solutions are a good thing, but that
this particular idea is going to hurt a lot more than it's going to
help.

One thing that _can_ work is to make RT generate From: and Reply-To:
addresses of the form rt+<ticketid> or rt-<ticketid> and use
the mail gateway's --ticket-id-from-extension feature to figure things
out.

	J



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