[rt-users] turning off automated e-mails

[Tom Hansen]

I am new to RT but I have done extensive searching on this and have not 
found what I am looking for.  So, apologies if this is an FAQ that I 
have somehow missed.

Basically, I want to set up RT4 so that it will only send e-mails upon 
explicit request.  No e-mails on ticket creation, no e-mails on status 
change, no e-mails on adding comments/replies.

I would just like, on every reply/comment, to have an "e-mail this" 
option so that an admin can very simply choose at the time of entering a 
reply or comment, to actually send as an e-mail.  The DEFAULT would 
always be to NOT send any e-mails to anyone, and even if you choose to 
update a requestor on a particular reply or comment, I don't want that 
action to "turn on the faucet" for that user- I want the default to 
always be NO E-MAIL.

Why is this?  Because I know that my user base would be irritated by 
such e-mails.  I know I am when I get automated replies like "Your 
ticket #7546564 has been received.  Our next available tech will 
respond."  It's like calling an 800 number and getting the infamous 
"your call is very important to us.  Please hold and your call will be 
answered in the order it was received."

I ultimately would like the user to receive usually just one e-mail when 
the ticket is closed, consisting of a personal message from one of us 
that also gets recorded in RT.  That's it.  And even that should be 
optional.  Even if the problem had to be bounced between two techs, 
escalated, placed on hold for a day pending response from the vendor, 
before finally being resolved by a third tech, and the manager.  I just 
don't want the user going on that roller-coaster ride with us unless 
they want to, and then we would only want to manually send out those 
pieces of information that we explicitly choose to share, at the time 
that we want to share it.

I don't want RT sending out ANY e-mails automatically, EVER.

But I still want the capability to manually choose to send any 
reply/comment from RT to a user if need be.  But only on explicit manual 
request from the admin entering the information into RT.

This sounds like such a simple, obvious scenario, yet I find support for 
it nowhere.  Must I spend a week learning the internals of RT and write 
my own extension, to just set it so that it will only send e-mails manually?


For now I have implemented a quick fix to allow me to use RT: I inserted 
an "exit" statement into the top of the Perl code routine that sends 
e-mails -- it was the top recommendation on the wiki -- and then I went 
in and, via a custom callback I got from the Wiki, suppressed the 
listing of those numerous "e-mail sent" entries that pollute the ticket 
history.  But this solution means that I'm forever copying and pasting 
to and from e-mails to users.  Which is fine, it's doable.  But why does 
it need to be so hard to just turn off automatic e-mailing from RT?

-- 
Tom Hansen
Senior Information Processing Consultant
UWM School of Freshwater Sciences
Great Lakes WATER Institute
tomh at uwm.edu
www.freshwater.uwm.edu