[rt-users] Recommendations for email validation portal

[Nathan Cutler]

> What I'm interested in is having some sort of frontend to RT that
> would, upon receiving an email, email the user back with a link they
> must click before the email is submitted to RT (and ticket generated).
> Bonus points if such a solution can track users who have validated in
> the past and let them bypass this validation.
>
> Has anyone done something like this that can offer recommendations?

If you have some proficiency in Perl, you can write a plug-in to rt-mailgate:

http://bestpractical.com/docs/rt/latest/rt-mailgate.html#CUSTOMIZATION

(I recently wrote and deployed one.) It's pretty easy to make it do
practically anything you want -- since it's just a Perl script. You
can set RT (in RT_SiteConfig.pm) to not automatically create new RT
users for all incoming emails, and then in the plug-in you can
validate the incoming emails against already existing RT users.
Although RT does not (AFAIK) allow you to assign multiple email
addresses to a single user, you can work around this with the
MergeUsers extension.

This is probably not the only way to approach the problem. It's also
possible to do stuff with CanonicalizeUserName(?), but I haven't tried
that.

Hope this helps.

Nathan