Use attachment as original message?

RT Users
1

Hi – we’ve just cut over to using RT as our helpdesk system, and so far so
good. Perhaps someone on this list could help with workflow enhancement that
would be nice. Sometimes users email our support staff directly, rather than
using ‘support@mydomain.com’. The support person then typically forwards that
email to support@mydomain.com to get it into trac (especially if they’re
traveling or it’s a weekend and they don’t have easy access to the web
interface).

What would be cool would be if, when trac gets an email from an authenticated
user and it contains an attachment (maybe with some special text in the body),
it would parse the attachment as the ticket rather than the containing email.
That would set the requestor correctly automatically, so we don’t have to go
into the ticket and fix it manually, and it would also make the ticket
“cleaner” with less junk around the original submission.

Is there perhaps already an add-on to do this? Or maybe I can modify the
email to trac parser? I’m not bad with perl, so if there are examples of
detecting and getting attachments and how the regular parser works, that would
probably get me going.

Thanks!

Gary

2

Hi Gary

would be nice. Sometimes users email our support staff directly, rather than
using ‘support@mydomain.com’. The support person then typically forwards that
email to support@mydomain.com to get it into trac (especially if they’re
traveling or it’s a weekend and they don’t have easy access to the web
interface).

If your staff are using Thunderbird, I can recommend the MailRedirect
extension - http://mailredirect.mozdev.org/ - it’s like forwarding,
except the mail appears to have originated from the customer. (some
other MUAs have this functionality built in - mutt springs to mind).

Cheers
Toby

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3

Toby Darling wrote:

Hi Gary

…The support person then typically forwards that

If your staff are using Thunderbird, I can recommend the MailRedirect

Thanks Toby – that’s not a bad idea. We do mostly use Tbird, but
unfortunately I can’t make everyone install the extension and use it :-(, and
besides some of them are on Macs, especially on the road. Still, it may help
until a centralized RT solution comes along.

I also thought about extending the RT commands-by-email extension; that might
work, if I can learn enough about how it works.

Gary