Do you all have any creative solutions for dealing with multiple email
addresses from the same person so you don’t end up with two user
accounts per person? I see situations where someone has their email
client misconfigured so they send mail out as
username@mail.organization.com when most of the time they are
username@organization.com
We can probably use procmail examine and sometimes re-write email
addresses before they go into RT, but I was curious what others have
done. Part of my problem is there are many machines email may come from
bob@hisownbox.org.com, stan@mailserver1.org.com, etc
-----Original Message-----
From: rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com
[mailto:rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com] On Behalf
Of John Arends
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 2:51 PM
To: rt-users@lists.bestpractical.com
Subject: [rt-users] Multiple Email Addresses
Do you all have any creative solutions for dealing with
multiple email
addresses from the same person so you don’t end up with two user
accounts per person? I see situations where someone has their email
client misconfigured so they send mail out as
username@mail.organization.com when most of the time they are
username@organization.com
We can probably use procmail examine and sometimes re-write email
addresses before they go into RT, but I was curious what others have
done. Part of my problem is there are many machines email may
come from
bob@hisownbox.org.com, stan@mailserver1.org.com, etc
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This one’s come up before - I don’t think there’s a simple solution. What
would be nice is a user merge function that works like a ticket merge.
Steve
Stephen Turner
Senior Programmer/Analyst - Client Support Services
MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T)
Do you all have any creative solutions for dealing with multiple email
addresses from the same person so you don’t end up with two user
accounts per person? I see situations where someone has their email
client misconfigured so they send mail out as
username@mail.organization.com when most of the time they are
username@organization.com
in RT_SiteConfig.pm see:
CanonicalizeEmailAddressMatch
CanonicalizeEmailAddressReplace
CanonicalizeOnCreate
That at least lets you map various email addresses to one address,
if you can do it with generic regexps.
In my case, this would squeeze bobg@tigger.uic.edu, bobg@uic.edu, bobg@icarus.cc.uic.edu, etc.
But no relation to bobg@aol.com. And of course, an append to a ticket
only goes to a single address.
In my case, we go a small step further, becuase the cannonical mail address here
is related to the web logon, so when an account gets created,
either by web or email, both web and email parts of the account are done right.
bobg
We have this problem, too, only worse. Since the user name portion of the
e-mail is not consistent across addresses for the same person, the
variations cannot be captured with a single regular expression.
It best long-term solution I could think of involves adding an “alternate
email addresses” field to the user table which could be used to
canonicalize addresses.
–David
rt-users-bounces@lists.bestpractical.com wrote on 11/29/2006 02:50:39 PM:
Next question:
Lets say you’ve had this problem for over a year, and you’re users
table is filled with duplicates. Is there any easy way to either
merge these duplicate users or delete the duplicates?
-GarretOn Nov 29, 2006, at 3:24 PM, Bob Goldstein wrote:
Do you all have any creative solutions for dealing with multiple
email
addresses from the same person so you don’t end up with two user
accounts per person? I see situations where someone has their email
client misconfigured so they send mail out as
username@mail.organization.com when most of the time they are
username@organization.com
in RT_SiteConfig.pm see:
CanonicalizeEmailAddressMatch
CanonicalizeEmailAddressReplace
CanonicalizeOnCreate
That at least lets you map various email addresses to one address,
if you can do it with generic regexps.
In my case, this would squeeze bobg@tigger.uic.edu, bobg@uic.edu,
bobg@icarus.cc.uic.edu, etc.
But no relation to bobg@aol.com. And of course, an append to a
ticket
only goes to a single address.
In my case, we go a small step further, becuase the cannonical
mail address here
is related to the web logon, so when an account gets created,
either by web or email, both web and email parts of the account
are done right.
bobg
Garret W. Huntress
System Administrator / System Developer
Geophysical Laboratory
Carnegie Institution of Washington
5251 Broad Branch Road, NW
Washington, DC 20015
Email: ghuntress@ciw.edu
Phone: (202)-478-8973
AIM: Garret Huntress

Garret Huntress.vcf (17.6 KB)
It looks like these two lines will do what I want for a start:
#Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressMatch , ‘@subdomain.example.com$’);
#Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressReplace , ‘@example.com’);
To handle multiple email servers would I do something like this? My
regexp knowledge is not that great.
#Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressMatch ,
’@(subdomain1..dept|subdomain2.something|subdomain3).example.com$’);
Bob Goldstein wrote:
RT-Extension-MergeUsers-0.02 - Merges two users into the same effective user - metacpan.org
Just to clarify – with this extension, if user1 has been merged into
user2, and user1 submits a ticket, the ticket gets created with user2 as
the requestor?
It looks like these two lines will do what I want for a start:
#Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressMatch , ‘@subdomain.example.com$’);
#Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressReplace , ‘@example.com’);
To handle multiple email servers would I do something like this? My
regexp knowledge is not that great.
#Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressMatch ,
‘@(subdomain1..dept|subdomain2.something|subdomain3).example.com$’);
Yes, but I’d be leary of the @ signs, which you don’t need in this case.
My file is:
Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressMatch , ‘(tigger|icarus|mailserv).(cc.)?uic.edu$’);
Set($CanonicalizeEmailAddressReplace , ‘uic.edu’);
bobg
Hi John,
Do you all have any creative solutions for dealing with multiple email
addresses from the same person so you don’t end up with two user
accounts per person? I see situations where someone has their email
client misconfigured so they send mail out as
username@mail.organization.com when most of the time they are
username@organization.com
We can probably use procmail examine and sometimes re-write email
addresses before they go into RT, but I was curious what others have
done. Part of my problem is there are many machines email may come from
bob@hisownbox.org.com, stan@mailserver1.org.com, etc
I’m very much of the opinion that RT isn’t the right place to do the
normalisation. Your MTA handles all your RT email, so do it there.
This corrects the address before RT ever sees it.
We use Exim (http://www.exim.org/) as the MTA for all our unix based mail.
Here our addresses aren’t simply transformed but go from a.person@domain
to user@host so we can’t use the simple regular expression replacement.
This method is as powerful as your knowledge of your chosen MTA.
Regards, Ian.
David Chandek-Stark david.chandek.stark@duke.edu writes:
We have this problem, too, only worse. Since the user name portion of the
e-mail is not consistent across addresses for the same person, the
variations cannot be captured with a single regular expression.
It best long-term solution I could think of involves adding an “alternate
email addresses” field to the user table which could be used to
canonicalize addresses.
The completely generic solution is to override the
CanonicalizeEmailAddresses function in User.pm (see
Request Tracker Wiki for details
on how to do this cleanly).
Espen Wiborg espenhw@ovitas.no
The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar
tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
I installed this but it as if it isn’t there. The User_Vendor.pm file is
present with the user merge code, and if I look at the source of
Modify.html, the changes have been made to add code related to the merge
function.
There is no option to merge users though.
Jesse Vincent wrote: