Front-ending the list with my ticketing system is a thought. By raising
this point, though, you've helped me figure out I had some kind of assumed
requirement/interest about transparency that I would lose by going that
route. Still a possibility. Thanks.

Matt

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 4:32 PM, Smith, David <[email protected]> wrote:

>  I’ve seen several ticketing systems that do more-or-less that, usually
> with just Subject: munging. The initial email, before being distributed to
> the list, gets something like [Ticket 12345] prepended or appended to the
> subject, and usually an automatic header/footer warning users to leave the
> ticket tag intact.****
>
> ** **
>
> You certainly could track Message-ID and References headers, and would
> probably get a slightly cleaner result, but it seems like a lot of extra
> work for relatively little extra benefit.****
>
> ** **
>
> (You could also, if beneficial, tie this into whatever back-end database
> you might have, so that the emails double as a ticket log.)****
>
> ** **
>
> David Smith****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> *From:* [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
> *On Behalf Of *Matt Disney
> *Sent:* Monday, June 04, 2012 3:22 PM
> *To:* [email protected]
> *Subject:* [lopsa-tech] Email list to request ticket****
>
> ** **
>
> I have an email list that is mainly used for reporting issues. I want to
> automatically create tickets from emails to that list. However, that list
> also serves as a discussion list in some cases. So forwarding all messages
> to the list into my ticket system would mean that the discussion and
> replies would result in a fair number of bogus tickets.
>
> Although I think the clear answer is to break up the email list into a
> couple of separate lists (i.e., one for discussion and one for issue
> reporting), that doesn't seem like a good solution in this case due to the
> email list itself acting as an internal brand that would be hard to
> reproduce with new lists.
>
> Anybody have good ideas on this?
>
> I have an idea but I suspect it is absurd over-engineering:
>
> First I would add the ticket system email address to the email list in
> question. At this state, every message to that list would generate a ticket.
>
> Then I would add an email gateway program/script in front of the ticket
> system email address that would act as a conditional stateful filter. That
> program would receive the message, check the References and In-Reply-To
> headers against a list of previously seen Message-IDs. If there is a match
> against a previously seen Message-ID, the message is dropped. If there is
> no match, then the program adds this current Message-ID to the list and
> allows the message to pass through to the ticket system.
>
> At this point, hopefully I would get all new messages to the email list
> entered as a new ticket. But none of the replies to the email list. So I'm
> left with still having to resolve a small number of first messages in
> discussion threads, but overall that isn't so bad. I'm willing to accept
> that level of maintenance for the overall automation.
>
> That's a silly idea, right?
>
> Matt****
>
_______________________________________________
Tech mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech
This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators
 http://lopsa.org/

Reply via email to