Suggestion regarding tickets created by the "Out of Office" agent in Notes

RT Users
1

I’ve been noticing a lot of tickets that are being created because a
ticket was resolved when someone was out of the office. The thing creating
the tickets is the “Out of Office” auto-reply. There are components of
this message that I can count on as always being the same. Does anyone
have a suggestion as to how I can keep these from being created as
tickets? Here is the progression:

  1. A user has a ticket that is resolved while they are out on vacation
  2. The technician closes the ticket and RT sends them a message
  3. Their email account (we use Domino) automatically sends a message back
    to RT stating that the employee is out of the office.
  4. If we close the ticket that was auto created before they get back from
    vacation, this whole process starts over again.

The main problem has to do with accuracy. Our department wants to make
sure that our data is as accurate as possible, and this kind of situation
throws it off a bit.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions…

2
  1. If we close the ticket that was auto created before they get back from
    vacation, this whole process starts over again.

I don’t have a solution for the general problem, but for step 4, here are
some possibilities.

  1. change the status to “rejected”, which closes the ticket without
    sending an autoreply

  2. delete the ticket, which hides it (we don’t allow delete permission
    here, though)

  3. Merge the autoreply into the original ticket (because it could help to
    know they were out when it was resolved) and close the original ticket,
    again (only works if you’ve implemented my OnResolveOnce action)

Yes, I know. I’m going to get an autoreply from somewhere when I send
this. :slight_smile:

Russell Mosemann, Ph.D. * Computing Services * Concordia University, Nebraska
“Will reading a PowerBook make you computer literate?”

3

I’ve been noticing a lot of tickets that are being created because a
ticket was resolved when someone was out of the office. The thing creating
the tickets is the “Out of Office” auto-reply. There are components of
this message that I can count on as always being the same. Does anyone
have a suggestion as to how I can keep these from being created as
tickets?

Can you get me an example notes out of office autoreply, complete with
all headers? In the absence of an actual standard, we look for
characteristics of autoreplies when we decide whether to squelch.
Clearly notes isn’t sending the same thing as everybody else.

4

MikeHamilton@clovisusd.k12.ca.us wrote:

I’ve been noticing a lot of tickets that are being created because a
ticket was resolved when someone was out of the office. The thing
creating the tickets is the “Out of Office” auto-reply. There are
components of this message that I can count on as always being the
same. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can keep these from
being created as tickets? Here is the progression:

  1. A user has a ticket that is resolved while they are out on vacation
  2. The technician closes the ticket and RT sends them a message
  3. Their email account (we use Domino) automatically sends a message
    back to RT stating that the employee is out of the office.
  4. If we close the ticket that was auto created before they get back
    from vacation, this whole process starts over again.

This sounds like a great time to apply Russell Mosemann’s OnResolve Once
template. I believe he sent it out to this list earlier this month. I
will look to see if I have that mail handy to forward to you individually.

DB

5

MikeHamilton@clovisusd.k12.ca.us writes:

I’ve been noticing a lot of tickets that are being created because a
ticket was resolved when someone was out of the office. The thing creating
the tickets is the “Out of Office” auto-reply. There are components of
this message that I can count on as always being the same. Does anyone
have a suggestion as to how I can keep these from being created as
tickets?

Whack the mail server administrators around the head with a clue bat
until they reconfigure the server to NOT send out-of-office replies
to mails with a “Precedence: bulk” header.

That is mail server administration 101.

Leif Nixon - Systems expert
National Supercomputer Centre - Linkoping University

6
  1. If we close the ticket that was auto created before they get back
    from vacation, this whole process starts over again.

This sounds like a great time to apply Russell Mosemann’s OnResolve Once
template. I believe he sent it out to this list earlier this month. I
will look to see if I have that mail handy to forward to you individually.

It’s also available at your neighborhood wiki under ScripConditions. :slight_smile:

http://wiki.bestpractical.com/index.cgi?Contributions

Russell Mosemann, Ph.D. * Computing Services * Concordia University, Nebraska
“I decided to go into computer programming instead of music because
my Bach was worse than my byte.” - my quote in Reader’s Digest

7

MikeHamilton@clovisusd.k12.ca.us wrote:

I’ve been noticing a lot of tickets that are being created because a
ticket was resolved when someone was out of the office. The thing

  1. A user has a ticket that is resolved while they are out on vacation
  2. The technician closes the ticket and RT sends them a message
  3. Their email account (we use Domino) automatically sends a message
    back to RT stating that the employee is out of the office.
  4. If we close the ticket that was auto created before they get back
    from vacation, this whole process starts over again.

This sounds like a great time to apply Russell Mosemann’s OnResolve Once
template. I believe he sent it out to this list earlier this month. I
will look to see if I have that mail handy to forward to you individually.

That assumes that the vacation auto-reply is coming back with the same
subject, so that RT can file it into the original ticket. Unfortunately,
this behaviour cannot be relied upon, particularly if you are dealing with
customers outside your own mail system.

So, if you’ve got a regular series of vacation messages coming in, the
easiest solution is to encapsulate the invocation to RT within a
procmailrc file that filters out such bad messages.

Bruce.

8

Can you get me an example notes out of office autoreply, complete with
all headers? In the absence of an actual standard, we look for
characteristics of autoreplies when we decide whether to squelch.
Clearly notes isn’t sending the same thing as everybody else.

I think RT needs a much better squelch than just guessing if it is an
autoreply, since there are a bazillion different formats.

We had an issue with one of our vendors: the autoreply to mail sent to
them comes from a different address. RT dutifully forwards a copy of
that autoreply to the requestor address, and then a short while later,
their autoreply comes back into the ticket, which dutifully forwards a
copy to the requestor, etc., etc., etc.

RT 3.2 so if this is fixed in 3.4, sorry for the noise. There has to
be an address-based rate limit.