Email based trouble ticketing system

[Bill McGonigle]

On Sep 13, 2005, at 17:19, Travis Roy wrote:

> The way the system is setup support emails go to each tech, and to the 
> ticketing system. The boss (and others in my group) are replying to 
> the emails sent to them, not through the ticketing system. This is 
> causing a problem.
>
> I can not get him to change his behavior so I must find another 
> solution. They don't want to kill the forwards to each of us in case 
> the ticketing system goes down (silly, considering the Ipswitch Imail 
> server has gone down at least 40 times since the ticketing system was 
> put in place, and the ticketing system has never gone down)

So, you want a ticketing system that knows that an e-mail that wasn't 
sent through it, where the essential identifying information has been 
changed, is part of a particular ticket?  Maybe I missed something.

You need to point your support@ address to a pipe through the ticket 
system and distribute the e-mails through [RT,whatever else] so it can 
be tagged with a UID.

If the boss is so paranoid, keep a copy of each message stashed in a 
maildir before it hits RT and have an extra /etc/aliases ready to go in 
case of disaster to distribute e-mails.  But I know businesses that 
live and breathe RT and I've done some performance optimization for 
them, and the thing just doesn't go down.

Keep good backups, sure, but it's apache, postfix, stateless processing 
(backup your database "just in case") - this is proven stuff.

-Bill

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