Choosing requesters in responses

[lrsatlanta]

Howdy folks!

I've got a quick question about requesters. Right now, Cerb4 adds everyone on an incoming email as a requester. This is great, we are happy with this functionality and behavior.

However, there are times when I'd like to reply to only one person on the list. I can modify this in the response by clicking the "change" link next to the list of requesters in the response dialog. But this also removes them from the list of requesters on the ticket. I'd prefer that they be left as requesters on the ticket, just not on that one response. Thoughts?

Secondly, is there a way to keep Cerb4 from adding specific addresses as requesters? Specifically, we use some automated emails to helpdesk that reference the ticket mask and they come from www or webmaster. Can we make it exclude those when adding addresses to a ticket? Also, this functionality seems not to be working correctly. I have our www and webmaster addresses in the "Always exclude these recipients" box and they are still receiving replies. I guess that if the latter functionality was working, I wouldn't necessarily need the ability to absolutely exclude the addresses from being added. As long as no replies were sent.

-Lawrence

[Hildy]

The PARSER_AUTO_REQ_EXCLUDE setting is only used for tagging additional To:/Cc: addresses, not the from address itself. (see line 520 c.f. of api/app/Parser.php)

I can kindof see an argument for making it apply to From: address as well, but I can also see reasons not to. If you want this, I'd suggest opening an issue at wgmdev.com, though I'm not gonna guarantee we'll do it. ;-)

Just above that is where we add the From as a requester (line 514), so you could also add a simple if statement there to ignore the particular addresses you don't want added as requesters.

[lrsatlanta]

Dan,

That's fine, we don't need it changed, necessarily, so I don't see the need to submit a JIRA issue. We can certainly modify the code as you suggested.

But it would be nice if we could automatically prevent those addresses from receiving any subsequent replies to the ticket once they have been added as requesters.

Is this not what the "Always exclude these recipients" box in the Mail Parser settings is supposed to do? Of course it's in the "Incoming Mail Preferences" section which is a little confusing to me since replies from helpdesk seem to be outgoing mail. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what those prefs do and how this is supposed to work.

And what do you think about my wish to be able to send email to only one of the requesters while not modifying the requester list itself from within a Reply?

-Lawrence

[Hildy]

The 'Always exclude these recipients" setting is somewhat confusingly labeled, yes. It's designed for a case where you CC a copy of all your mail to a backup address (for archiving, emergency, or other purpose), which is why it's only on the To: and Cc: headers. Excluding matches on the From: header presents a very real possibility of having a Ticket with no requesters at all, which would be a bad (though not fatal) thing. So in this case, "recipients" refers to the original recipients on incoming mail, not the outgoing recipients of helpdesk-generated mail. This feature works by never adding the Requester in the first place, not by preventing mail from being sent to that address. You could probably do something along those lines in api/app/Mail.php, but I haven't explored that at all.


As to your request of "Reply to only Requester X", it's an interesting idea, but it would require more convoluted code. Right now, Mail.php determines whether a Reply or a Forward is being sent by the presence of a To: variable; replies simply use the ticket's requester list, so overloading To: would result in Mail.php thinking it's a forward, not a reply.

[lrsatlanta]

Aha. Now I understand the recipient exclusion thingy. Thanks for that explanation.

I see what you are saying about the requester list. I may open an issue about this in JIRA as an enhancement request. It seems to me like a logical and sensible request. Having the ability to choose the requester(s) to whom a reply is sent from the requester list has already come up as a need for me. More importantly, having that change dialog not delete the requesters from the ticket.

Of course, I'm much more interested in comments and attachments. Don't get me wrong. ;-)

-Lawrence