I have an email list that is mainly used for reporting issues. I want to automatically create tickets from emails to that list. However, that list also serves as a discussion list in some cases. So forwarding all messages to the list into my ticket system would mean that the discussion and replies would result in a fair number of bogus tickets.
Although I think the clear answer is to break up the email list into a couple of separate lists (i.e., one for discussion and one for issue reporting), that doesn't seem like a good solution in this case due to the email list itself acting as an internal brand that would be hard to reproduce with new lists. Anybody have good ideas on this? I have an idea but I suspect it is absurd over-engineering: First I would add the ticket system email address to the email list in question. At this state, every message to that list would generate a ticket. Then I would add an email gateway program/script in front of the ticket system email address that would act as a conditional stateful filter. That program would receive the message, check the References and In-Reply-To headers against a list of previously seen Message-IDs. If there is a match against a previously seen Message-ID, the message is dropped. If there is no match, then the program adds this current Message-ID to the list and allows the message to pass through to the ticket system. At this point, hopefully I would get all new messages to the email list entered as a new ticket. But none of the replies to the email list. So I'm left with still having to resolve a small number of first messages in discussion threads, but overall that isn't so bad. I'm willing to accept that level of maintenance for the overall automation. That's a silly idea, right? Matt
_______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
