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

[Tony Aiuto]

>Jesse Vincent writes:

>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"

Well, in truth, I can't vouch for a lot of mailers.  I still
use /bin/mail.

>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.

True as well.   That's why it has to be a fallback to parsing
the subject, not the preferred method.


>> 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.

Quite Possibly.  As I said in earlier mail, I'm not taking
the ticket id out of the subject line.  I think, however, I'm
going to leave the fallback to In-Reply-To hack in my system
and see how it goes.  Eventually I'll find out if it works or
not (at least for my customer base - YMMV :-) ).