[rt-users] Filtering incoming emails

[Kenneth Crocker]

Mathew,


	We have a setup here that seems to accomplish what you are looking to 
do but we don't do it with all the complications you seem to be stuck 
with in terms of your email. We have over 50 queues for the support of 
various application software groups but do NOT let anyone outside those 
technical support groups create any tickets in them. We set up one queue 
to act as an "Approval" (front-end request waiting room) queue and we 
granted privileges for ONLY that queue to allow the creation of tickets 
from self-service or any number of defined groups that are NOT technical 
support groups. We then defined an approval group to be the only group 
that can approve a request ticket in that queue and move it to the 
appropriate support queue for work. They have a Custom Field defined 
that allows them and ONLY them to modify it and some scrips that 
evaluate that CF modification during a transaction and THAT modification 
will trigger any number of other modifications to "Owner", other data 
fields, AND send out notifications of ticket movement or promotions to 
the appropriate watchers/requesters/Admin people. This way, the ticket 
number is always the same and ALL it's history goes with it to whatever 
queue it ends up in. But most importantly, we can stay with the 
flexibility design of the RT code and NOT have to maintain a whole bunch 
of complicated modifications to base code or to mess with the simplicity 
of the email/alias functionality. This may not be your cup of tea, but 
for restricting requests and single-threading approvals, it certainly 
works for us. Hope this helps.

Kenn
LBNL

On 11/4/2007 4:18 AM, Mathew Snyder wrote:
> We are using 3.6.1 with postfix and procmail.  It isn't a complicated setup but
>  a new configuration we're testing has an interesting "feature" which needs some
> special attention.
> 
> We have five customer-facing queues (Triage, Network, Systems, Operations and
> Sales).  Triage is the only one in which tickets can be created by outside
> parties.  The other four  support correspondence but cannot have new tickets
> created within by outside parties.  In to facilitate this, we run a cron job
> which polls our customer database and builds a procmail script listing all of
> the allowed "from" addresses.  Any incoming email is parsed through the script
> and if allowed is then handed off to rt-mailgate.
> 
> In the /etc/aliases file, we alias the four non-triage queues to Triage which,
> again, allows new ticket creation.  This serves to place all new ticket requests
> in Triage as a new ticket while allowing RT to do it's thing by parsing the
> subject and placing all correspondence for existing tickets in the right place.
> 
> On the surface this is a wonderful setup.  We guarantee that all new tickets are
> only in the new ticket queue while all existing tickets get updated
> appropriately.  However, I have discovered a fault which I'm hoping the RT
> Faithful can help me with.
> 
> I have a monthly cron job which generates an email to be sent to one of the four
> other queues; one of the four which doesn't allow new ticket creation.  However,
> the "from" address for this email is internal.  The ticket that it generates is
> intended to spawn three child tickets.  The problem is that, since this is a new
> ticket, it gets trapped in the Triage queue and isn't allowed to move on to the
> queue it is intended for.
> 
> What I need help with is finding a method that will allow this one email (or any
> internal email, actually) to be allowed to bypass Triage and go directly to its
> intended queue.
> 
> I've considered not aliasing the one queue to Triage.  This will lead to an
> unwanted side-effect.  Right now, by trapping all new ticket requests in Triage,
> we are preventing the automatically generated email which confusingly states
> that a person is not allowed to create a ticket.  Instead, the ticket is created
> in Triage and the auto-reply is sent stating this.  Should I cease the aliasing,
> if a person decides to send a ticket to Systems (the non-Triage queue which the
> email cron job is sending to) then they will receive the reply stating that a
> user could not be found or whatever the confusing reply is.  I'd like to avoid this.
> 
> So, if I haven't convoluted this yet and someone has been able to follow what
> I'm trying to say, can that person help me figure out how to allow incoming,
> internal emails to avoid this trap I've created?
>