[rt-users] RT behavior when CCs are present in a ticket

[ktm at rice.edu]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:04:39PM +0000, Guadagnino Cristiano wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have received a few complaints from users about a feature of RT.
> After a little experimenting, I find that those complaints are partially 
> reasonable, so I want to share them with you and get some feedback.
> 
> When RT receives an email that is bound to an already existing ticket, 
> it notifies everyone in that ticket (requestor, CCs...). So far 
> everything is good.
> 
> Now picture this situation: Bill wants to send an email to Tom, CCing 
> John and Jenny and RT (because he wants this conversation to remain 
> recorded in the ticket's history). The mail is linked to an already 
> existing ticket (i.e. the subject contains the magical tag). Bill is not 
> the ticket's original requestor.
> 
> Here comes the "problem": Tom, John and Jenny will receive one email 
> from Bill and another identical mail from RT. Even Bill will receive his 
> email back from RT. Even worse, all this emails will look like it was 
> the ticket owner who sent them.
> 
> I think RT is being overzealous here: since RT already parses the email 
> header looking for CCs, it should know that those messages are not 
> useful, since those persons are already receiving the original email. So 
> it should only notify people who are CCs for the ticket but are NOT 
> included in the email sent from Bill.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Bye
> Cris
> 
> p.s. This is happening on our production RT, which is still at 3.8.10. I 
> don't know if RT 4 changed something in this respect.
> 

Hi Chris,

RT's basic premise is that it is the issue management system and handles
notifications and updates. If out-of-band additional CC's are done, they 
will get the CC and the RT update. That being said, you can add these
checks yourself to the scrips that send the "extra" Email to not send
them in this case. If you do, please put them on the wiki since that seems
like useful functionality. Having worked with people using the same
workflow, it resulted in RT missing updates should the updater "forget"
to reply to RT resulting in missing history. They did much better when
all they remembered was to just reply to the RT message only and it would
handle the needed additional notifications.

Regards,
Ken