Our main use case is to receive customer emails in specific queues, to which internally we reply via the RT ticketing.
When we reply via the RT ticket to the customer initial email, we noticed that RT sends a new email instead of keeping the same email thread, this can be quire tedious if several replies are shared with the customer.
Is there a way how to reply via RT but keeping the same email thread with the customer?
Basically if the subject is missing your subject tag and a ticket # it won’t be able to map an incoming email to an existing ticket.
What Garry is asking, is if your outgoing emails from RT have this subject tag in the email or if one of your email templates is potentially removing/changing it
As I understand it, whether email is shown threaded or not is an issue for the receiver’s email client. The client can use any or all of the email headers such as “Subject:”, “Message-ID”, “In-Reply-To”, “References”, etc in order to construct a threaded view of an email folder.
I’m fairly sure that when I look at emails from RT in my mail client (rather than via the web interface) they are correctly threaded.
So you need to figure out which particular headers your user’s email clients use to present a threaded view of a folder and then make sure that RT is doing the “right thing” with them.
In addition to Duncan’s suggestions, if some of those headers are being stripped out,I’d check what is happening on the email server. Perhaps a virus scanner/malware scanner is stripping out headers.
I’m understanding Alessandro’s question from a different perspective. Just to clarify, Alessandro:
Are you asking about maintaining the conversation thread in the e-mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) where the client is responsible of sorting every mail received in threads, or not, depending on user’s preference? or…
Are you asking about the mail sent from RT that doesn’t keep the previous “correspondences” in the mail body in the same way when you reply to a mail in the e-mail client? By default RT sends a new mail, and optionally you can add a previous comment/response in your reply, but not all the previous responses.
I understand that your question is the second one (maybe I’m wrong). If that’s the case, none of the previous answers are related to your doubt.
First of all thank you all for your feedback, much appreciated!
The use case is the second point in sollericos comment, i.e.
The mail sent from RT doesn’t keep the previous “correspondences” in the mail body in the same way when you reply to a mail in the e-mail client? By default RT sends a new mail, and optionally you can add a previous comment/response in your reply, but not all the previous responses.
Apologies if the request was not clear from the start.
Is there something that can be done to keep the correspondences instead of sending a new email each time?
That’s something I can’t help you with. I’ve started using RT last year and this is a feature that is ok for me now.
I have Jira installed too (I’m migrating from Jira to RT) and Jira shows a similar behavior.
IMO: I prefer things working like now. Any user can login to see all previous comments or responses. There is no need of carrying the history in every mail sent, despite I recognize it’s more comfortable for end users.
To do this you would need to modify the Template that is used for Correspondence (by default it is called Correspondence) but I don’t know exactly how to change it to include all the correspondence history.
I would caution against this approach though, as it will rapidly result in very big histories that are hard to follow in RT.
You can just use the email interface of course, and reply via email which would preserve the email thread - our clients often do this, and some long-lived tickets do struggle to display when they get very long.
It might be better to see if you can change user behaviour though, to push them towards using the web interface, assuming you grant them access, or can use the Self Service portal.
You can easily amend the Correspondence template to include a link at the top - “To view all ticket history, please log in to the support system [here]” where [here] is the url of the ticket in question.
We put a link in the top of our admin emails that is {$RT::WebURL}Ticket/Display.html?id={$Ticket->id} but that assumes all the users can access RT. For Self Service users I think that would be {$RT::WebURL}SelfService/Display.html?id={$Ticket->id}
I hope that helps with finding an approach that will work for you.
Thanks for the feedback, could you please guide me on how to fix this?
As you mentioned, our end users correspond with our support team by emails, so we would like to keep things as is, but improving the email thread our users received when our support reply to them.
First off, apologies for mis-interpreting what you were wanting in my previous reply.
Perhaps I am still not fully understanding but it seems to me that you would get what you want if you click on the reply button next to each ticket correspondence rather than use “Reply” from the “Actions” menu.
If you do that you get the quoted content included in your reply, which is what I think normal email clients do. That is: they don’t really include an entire thread in a reply - they just quote what was received in the last message. But if everyone in an email exchange quotes the entire message they just received then it seems to me that that gives the same result?
(Incidentally, I think the behaviour of quoting the entire message and adding new content at the top is horrible, and I don’t believe was what was originally intended when email clients started including quoted text in replies - but that battle has long been lost …
As Simon pointed out, you could do it better in RT than a typical email client by always including the entire thread regardless of what was being replied to via the RT web interface. You’d need to write a template that iterated over all previous transactions and include them in the reply. I’ve not thought too much about how to do that because its not something i would want - but you might find some ideas in a user-contributed template that you can find in the old RT wiki at AddTicketHistoryToMail - Request Tracker Wiki.
Thank you all for the feedback, especially Duncan and Sollericos.
We managed to find the fault in our internal processing when replying via RT, whereby we were deleting the initial customer request or the previous comment, hence why our customers were getting a new email without their previous comments.
We did some tests and now it is working as we were expecting.
