How does RT find an existing ticket for a new email?

RT Users
1

Hi folks. Quick question: I know RT can use the subject line [rt #XX] to find
an existing ticket for an incoming email, but if that’s missing, e.g. because
the customer just emailed me about the ticket, can RT figure it out in other
ways, using email headers like References, In-Reply-To or Thread-Index? Where
in the source would that be?

Gary

2

Hi folks. Quick question: I know RT can use the subject line [rt #XX]
to find
an existing ticket for an incoming email, but if that’s missing, e.g.
because
the customer just emailed me about the ticket, can RT figure it out in
other
ways, using email headers like References, In-Reply-To or
Thread-Index? Where
in the source would that be?

Gary -
Pretty sure no such functionality exists.

I've just hacked together some procmail/perl magic to deal with an

OEM partner who uses the world’s most braindead ticketing system because
their godsdamned Seibel installation can’t be convinced to put our RT
number in the subject line in addition to Seibel’s SR, so every piece of
ticket correspondence from within their system was generating a new RT
ticket.

I use procmail to get to RT, so I created a procmail recipe specific

to this partner’s sender addresses that pipes incoming email through a
perl filter; the filter grabs the SR out of the subject line and then
attempts to find an RT ticket that matches. If it does, it inserts the
appropriate [$rtname #$ticketid] into the subject line before passing it
on to rt-mailgate.

/Ole Craig
Security Engineer
Team lead, customer support

ocraig@stillsecure.com
303-381-3824 direct
303-381-3802 support
303-381-3880 fax

www.stillsecure.com

3

Ole Craig wrote:

I use procmail to get to RT, so I created a procmail recipe specific

to this partner’s sender addresses that pipes incoming email through a
perl filter; the filter grabs the SR out of the subject line and then
attempts to find an RT ticket that matches. If it does, it inserts the
appropriate [$rtname #$ticketid] into the subject line before passing it
on to rt-mailgate.

That sounds like a start. If I were going to do this (hmm…) I think I’d
start by pulling out all the tickets for that sender, and first look at the
headers (In-Reply-To etc.) to see if I could find a match, and then try fuzzy
matching on the content. In our world, we don’t expect to have that many
tickets per sender, so it might work.

Maybe some day rt could get callbacks in the email ingestion routine so there
could be plugins to do this kind of thing? (Maybe it has them now & I just
don’t know it!)

Thanks for the ideas!

– Gary