Support replying to ticket notifications

[chrivers@…]

I'm trying to use trac+email2trac as a request tracket for the support@ email address at our company.

It mostly works, except for the following problems:

1) If the reporter answers to a notification email, that email is either sent from support@company, in which case the reply becomes a _new_ ticket, or it's sent from <other>@company, in which case it's not tracked. It doesn't seem to be possible to track replies to notifications, as replies in trac.

2) It's not possible to exclusively use trac, since for example you cannot attach files when replying to tickets. I don't want to use trac exclusively either, since my mail client is much nicer to compose mails in.

To solve these problems, I suggest something like the following scenario:

• The ticket number is put in the subject, like with RequestTracker? ("Ticket #42: Question about foo")

• A customer, bob@… has a request for support@…. He sends his question like a normal email (which pipes into email2trac)

• The company recieves a new ticket notification from trac (or email2trac), with the Reply-to header set to support@…. They reply to bobs request.

• Email2trac now gets another notification. This time it contains a valid ticket number in the subject, so email2trac can know it's a reply to a ticket, not a new ticket. The new text gets added as a reply to the ticket, and bob@… is sent the new reply as well.

• Bob has further questions, so he replies back to the ticket notification

• Bobs reply is again added as a reply in trac, and the company receives his reply

• The company this time send the final information to bob, and adds "FIXED" in the subject.

• The reply from the company is added in trac, and the ticket is closed. The reply is sent to bob.

I hope you can see the idea I have for using trac as a sort of mediator, or ticket gateway, if you will. As far as I can see, it should already be able to update tickets, although I have not successfully made this work yet.

Can you tell me what kind of work would be required to make email2trac act as outlined here? Would patches be accepted?

[bas]

Before i reply on this. Email2trac can handle attachments and replies to tickets + you can even change ticket fields via email

• ​https://subtrac.sara.nl/oss/email2trac/wiki/Email2tracConfiguration#TicketUpdate

Did you read that part and which version of email2trac do you use?

[chrivers@…]

Sorry, yes. I should have RTFM :-)

I have indeed suceeded in making email2trac work, I just hadn't set "ticket_update : 1" in email2trac.conf. That part works now. Excellent!

I've never had problems with attachments either - I was just commenting that trac itself does not seem to allow file uploads in replies to tickets (If it does, I don't know how). This is not a problem anyway, since I'm using my mail client for replying in almost all cases.

I'm using email2trac 0.9.5, but I see now that 0.10 has support for ticket updates. That's pretty clever, really. I'm definitely going to look into that.

Apart from that, it would be nice with an option to make email2trac strip this kind of header:

-----------------------+----------------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  chrivers  |       Owner:  tdn
      Type:  task      |      Status:  new
  Priority:  major     |   Milestone:     
 Component:  TODO      |     Version:     
Resolution:            |    Keywords:     
-----------------------+----------------------------------------------------

from incoming emails. It would make more sense to simply save the body of the email in the ticket reply.

[anonymous]

Yes that will be a nice option to strip the notification header. But you can also specifiy another notification template with the option:

alternate_notify_template : <filename>

Patches are welcome ;-)

[anonymous]

Does the order matter in the conf file? I've put ticket_update: 1 but no updating taking place

[DEFAULT]
project: /home/www-apps/trac/shots
debug: 1
umask: 022
spam_level: 5
reply_all : 0
mailto_link: 0
umask: 022
email_comment: >
email_header: 0
trac_version: 0.10
enable_syslog : 1
alternate_notify_template :
drop_spam : 0
verbatim_format: 1
strip_signature: 0
ticket_update: 1

[anonymous]

No, Is your subject line changed?

[bas]

No respone