[rt-users] users with multiple email addresses using mergeusers

[Mark D. Nagel]

On 4/5/2012 5:50 PM, Thomas Sibley wrote:
>
> Why are you doing this type of access control at the procmail level
> instead of just configuring rights appropriately within RT?  If you only
> hand out ReplyToTicket and CommentOnTicket to the appropriate watcher
> roles (Requestor + Cc here), then RT will do this check for you (and
> merged users might even Just Work the way you expect).
>
>

Well, I didn't want to get into the deep details unnecessarily, but
since you insist :).  The check is performed as part of an automerge
mechanism we developed to avoid ticket Cc storms.  You know, the storms
that develop when someone Cc's the original message to 20 people
including RT, and they all start emailing back and forth, each message
creating a brand new ticket?  The solution we worked out, which has been
very successful, is to pass the original message through a filter that
rewrites the subject.  A number of conditions must match:

    * subject must match (fuzzy matching, allows for Re:, Fwd:, etc.)
    * sender must be a requestor or cc (this is the condition I reported)
    * last update must be recent (within 24 hours)
    * exactly one ticket must match

It is a heuristic, and there are some other exceptions to avoid
accidental merging, but that is the jist of it.  This is not merging in
the traditional RT sense -- we are taking a subject that has no ticket
ID and prepending one so that the message is placed into the correct
ticket.  This is why we take such care to avoid accidental merging -- it
is virtually impossible to unmerge, unlike an RT-level merge.  I suppose
I could translate the logic into a Scrip that does an RT-level merge,
but I think the same problem with the sender match would be there.

I've sort of decided that the problem I uncovered is not really a big
problem, because the requesters that would need this behavior will not
generally end up being merged.  I was testing a new RT instance today
from my own account, which was merged into a primary account, and
discovered this behavior.

Thanks,
Mark

-- 
Mark D. Nagel, CCIE #3177 <mnagel at willingminds.com>
Principal Consultant, Willing Minds LLC (http://www.willingminds.com)
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