Is there a way I can enforce email ticket correspondence so that:
Right there you’ve got an easy solution. You can run RT through a
pre-filter (procmail), to catch:
- All ticket correspondence (either new ticket creations or additional
correspondence to existing tickets) can only have a subject line of say 5
chars to max 60 characters (I have some users who right an essay on the
subject line, and no body in the mail),
non-good subject lines. For instance, checking that you can quote a valid
membership name before it hits the ticketing system.
( And whilst on the subject of poor problem descriptions,
http://chroniclesofgeorge.nanc.com/ )
- All ticket correspondence must have content in the body of the email (say
a minimum of 5 characters and no enforced maximum).
Oooh, now this is harder with procmail. But, you can do it, with avid
reference to the procmailsc man page:
# Match (hopefully) a subject line between 5 and 60 characters,
# not including leading space, but including space afterwards.
:0
* ! ^Subject:\s+\S.{4,59}
! autoresponder-invalid-subject@example.com
# Decrease the score to -2, then add 1 each time we encounter
# a line with 5 or more characters in it, but not quoting
# characters ('>').
# Run mailgate if our score is over 2 (3 valid lines).
:0 Bh
* -2^0
* 1^1 ^\s*[^>]+\s*\S.{4,}
| rt-mailgate
# Still here?
:0
! autoresponder-nocontent@example.com
Note that I’ve treated this mail as an intellectual exercise, and haven’t
tested the above.
I would like to do one of two things when correspondence doesnt match the
above:
- Send rejection message back, saying the ticket has not created or the
correspondence has not been accepted becuase (and the reason),
See procmailex man page on how to create autoresponders.
- truncate the subject line, and repeat it in full in the body of the
message, (probably less harmful to users) and accept it, generating the
normal replies/actions, using the truncated subject line, etc.
Hrm… Tricky. Truncating the subject is not hard, eg:
ORIGSUBJECT=`formail -xSubject:`
SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject: | cut -c 1-60`
# Trim the subject to 60 chars if its over 60 chars
# Original subject gets left in header as Old-Subject:
:0 fhw
* ^Subject:\s+\S.{60,}
| formail -i"Subject: $SUBJECT"
But inserting it into the body of the message is somewhat harder… in
fact (after a few minutes of actually reading the procmail/formail man
pages), you’d be better writing a perl snippet to do this for you instead:
# Filter through a one-line perl snippet to trim the subject
# line if its over 60 chars (we don't bother running if its not
# over 60 chars), and to insert the subject in the body of the
# message.
:0 fhw
* ^Subject:\s+\S.{60,}
| perl -e '$inhead=1;prebod=undef; while(<>){ chomp; if(m/^$/){
$inhead=0; if(defined($prebod)){ print “\n\nOriginal Subject (>60 chars):
$prebod \n”;} } if($inhead && m/^Subject:\s+(\S.{0,59})(.*)$/ ){ print
“Subject: $1\n”; $prebod=$1 . $2; }else{ print “$_\n”; } }’
# Apply other checks, run rt-mailgate
Would these be easy to patch into RT? I’m currently on 2.0.8, but planning
on going to 2.0.13 when I get the chance to update it.
In the RT 2.0.x series, I’d say that you wouldn’t want to do this
pre-acceptance activity in RT itself. In RT 2.1+, where Jesse is looking
at Scrips that run before assiging a ticket number (and thus rejecting a
message then would make sense), doing it in RT would be a sinch.
Bruce Campbell RIPE
Systems/Network Engineer NCC
www.ripe.net - PGP562C8B1B Operations
