[rt-users] How to prevent Out-of-the-office Mails hitting RT ?

[Mike Patterson]

Stephen,

:I  used to get a lot of those when people used vacation rules that 
don't understand "bulk" headers and changed the subject line (before we 
upgraded our mail server).

When we had that problem, I used procmail to filter the mail before it 
got to RT.  If something slipped through, I'd stop sendmail, move the 
ticket to "nomail" then startup sendmail again (and sometimes update my 
procmail filter).  I suppose you could also customize all of the scrips 
involving autoreplies and correspondence to do a regexp search for "out 
of office" subject line before sending mail.

I used procmail to put "out of office" subject lines into a queue I 
created called "nomail" that does not autorespond.
I setup procmail based on these tips:
http://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/contrib/3.0/rt_procmail.html

Some more tips on procmail filtering here:
http://wiki.bestpractical.com/index.cgi?SpamFiltering

My setup files are below:
------------------------

My /etc/aliases looked like this.  It pipes mail for "general" to 
procmail instead of directly to a RT queue.
-----------------------------------------------------------
general: "|/usr/local/bin/procmail -m /etc/procmailrcs/rt"
-----------------------------------------------------------

My /etc/procmailrcs/rt file looks like this
-------------------------------------------
#this must be owned by root
HOME=/home/rt_distpatch
INCLUDERC=$HOME/.procmailrc

#are we still here after including? Dump it to someone
:0
! root at mymailserver.com
-----------------------------------------

My /home/rt_distpatch/.procmailrc looked like this
If the subject line matches it puts it into the "nomail" queue
Otherwise it puts it in the "general" queue.
---------------------------------------------------------------
SHELL=/bin/sh               #Use the Bourne shell (check your path!)
MAILDIR=${HOME}        #First check what your mail directory is!
LOGFILE=${MAILDIR}/procmail.log
LOG="--- Logging ${LOGFILE} for ${LOGNAME}, "
VERBOSE=yes
MAILDOMAIN=mymaildomain.com
RT_MAILGATE="/usr/local/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate"
RT_URL="http://myrtserver.com"

LOGABSTRACT=all

#sounds like out of office, send to "nomail" queue
:0
       * ^Subject:.*(out of office|vacation|family leave|out of the 
office|no longer work at|left the building|leave of 
absence|mailer-daemon|message status).*
:0
{
        | $HOME/dash.pl |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE --queue nomail 
--action corr
espond --url $RT_URL
             #if error email my account
            :0e
           ! mailme at mymaildomain.com
}
#general correspondence
:0
{
        :0
        |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE --queue general --action correspond 
--url $RT_URL
        #if error email my account
        :0e
        ! mailme at mymaildomain.com
}
---------------------------------------------------------------

Steffen Heinzmann wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> I'm quite new into RT and I have the below problem:
>
> When user creating a manual ticket, and ad an e-mail address for the 
> Requestor, and this
>
> Requestor has his e-mail system giving an Auto-Reply saying "Mr. X is 
> not in the office",
>
> This Auto-Reply is pulling everytime a new Ticket-number in RT.
>
> Is there a possiblity to filter the subject of each inbound e-mail to 
> RT, that e-mails with
>
> certain subjects like the string "is not in the office" are not 
> creating a Ticket in RT ?
>
> Do you have any sample code I could use ?
>
> Many thanks for your help ;-)
>
> Steffen
>
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-- 
Mike Patterson
Systems Manager
UC Berkeley Extension