Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] Usefull addons ?

[Michael Dean]

E-mail submission isn't meant to replace your support page, but provide
another avenue to receive help requests from customers.  This is what
DCL does with e-mail submissions to make the data somewhat sane:

1.  Special email aliases are created for support (i.e.,
address@hidden)
2.  MTA receives email at special address, pipes it to gateway script
3.  Script checks to see if dcl is a valid product (query for product
short description.  If not, kicks out an error which in turn sends email
back to originator.
4.  Ticket is assigned to the lead for that product.
5.  Defaults (based on configuration settings) are applied to account,
priority, and severity.  Account will be a possible auto-lookup in the
future when the new contact management feature of DCL is done.
6.  Subject is copied to Summary
7.  E-mail attachments are separated from body text
8.  Remaining e-mail body (minus attachments) is set as ticket issue.
9.  Ticket is created, watch notifications are sent (if any)
10. E-mail attachments are attached to the ticket

I'm not arguing that the data is completely clean, but with several
users requesting this feature (some using it as a tie-breaking item), it
is not something you want to dismiss so easily.

Mike

On Mon, 2001-12-31 at 11:24, Chris Weiss wrote:
> Maybe I just don't get this email submision thing because I've never used
> one, but it seems to me that email is way to free form and prone to error to
> be of any reliable use at all for for a human giving input to a machine.
> Emails get mangled all the time by virus filters, content filters, strickt
> rfc mail proxies, Joe Morron pressing enter to many times, HTML emails, RTF
> emails, charset of the day issues and so on.  Seem to me that it defeats the
> purpose of normalised, validated data and makes the system less usable.  And
> with a bookmark to the data entry page, I don't see how it makes it less
> accessable.