Re: [ietf-smtp] CC'ing ticket systems

[Tony Finch <[e-mail]>]

S Moonesamy <[e-mail]> wrote:
> At 03:55 AM 07-07-2020, Michael Richardson wrote:
>
> > Damn, that was not what you wanted.
> > What one wanted was to open a ticket and then collect the whole conversation
> > into it.
> > [...]
> > There are a bunch of things that I can imagine that might solve this,
> > ranging from the mundane to the revolutionary.
> > But, I wondered if others think it important to think about ticket systems
> > and other automated email processes.
>
> Please see RFC 3834.  I used it to avoid email loops, e.g. a service responder
> responding to another one.

There's a bit more to this ticketing system problem than just the
auto-responses. (And auto-response suppression doesn't kick in if the
thread involves people CC:ing each other directly as well as a mailing
list and a ticketing system etc...)

As far as I can tell the problem is that most ticketing systems are
oblivious to threading, so they don't try to use In-Reply-To: or
References: headers to tie incoming messages to existing tickets.

There is the related problem that certain common mail software also
willfully fails to implement standard threading. So even if ticketing
systems were aware of threads they would still have to cope with other
mail software that breaks threads.

This should all have been solved in the 1990s, bah.

Tony.
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