Recommendations for email validation portal

We currently handle almost all of our ticket submissions via email.
Because we don’t want to lose even one email, we tag email as spam but
do not filter it in RT. Obviously, this requires a lot of
queue-cleaning to remove all the junk mail.

What I’m interested in is having some sort of frontend to RT that
would, upon receiving an email, email the user back with a link they
must click before the email is submitted to RT (and ticket generated).
Bonus points if such a solution can track users who have validated in
the past and let them bypass this validation.

Has anyone done something like this that can offer recommendations?

Cheers,

GTG

What I’m interested in is having some sort of frontend to RT that
would, upon receiving an email, email the user back with a link they
must click before the email is submitted to RT (and ticket generated).
Bonus points if such a solution can track users who have validated in
the past and let them bypass this validation.

Has anyone done something like this that can offer recommendations?

If you have some proficiency in Perl, you can write a plug-in to rt-mailgate:

http://bestpractical.com/docs/rt/latest/rt-mailgate.html#CUSTOMIZATION

(I recently wrote and deployed one.) It’s pretty easy to make it do
practically anything you want – since it’s just a Perl script. You
can set RT (in RT_SiteConfig.pm) to not automatically create new RT
users for all incoming emails, and then in the plug-in you can
validate the incoming emails against already existing RT users.
Although RT does not (AFAIK) allow you to assign multiple email
addresses to a single user, you can work around this with the
MergeUsers extension.

This is probably not the only way to approach the problem. It’s also
possible to do stuff with CanonicalizeUserName(?), but I haven’t tried
that.

Hope this helps.

Nathan