Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender - Processing?

ProbablePrime

Hello, I'm running OsTicket v1.17.2,

Occasionally when a user creates a ticket on our system, their email is misspelt by them or otherwise unavailable. When our support team then replies to this ticket our email systems eventually return the unsent mail to the sender. With a typical "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" style message.

These messages show up in our ticket desk as new tickets from the email postmaster.

What I'd like to know is if there is some way we could process these Undelivered Mails and attach them back to the original ticket automatically.

This would allow our support team to become aware that a user's email is incorrect and allow them to follow up via alternative means.

Is something like this possible?
Would it be a plugin?
Or something to do with Email piping maybe?

Everything else about our ticket desk installation works correctly.

Thank you!

ProbablePrime

I'm seeing a bunch of code in osTicket that seems to suggest this might already be implemented but just be broken on my configuration. For example: https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/blob/4689926b2d3d25754f0ddcf8d4e181a2817f6d56/include/class.mailparse.php#L797)

Perhaps my mail provider isn't including the correct details in the response?

KevinTheJedi

ProbablePrime

Yes, typically the undeliverable mail headers won’t include the proper References and In-Reply-To headers for us to match to existing threads.

Cheers.

ProbablePrime

Ok, i'll see if I can tweak my email systems to handle this better.

Would you be able to provide any details on what OSTicket expects? If needed I can reverse engineer from the code.

Thank you!

KevinTheJedi

ProbablePrime

Mainly the References and In-Reply-To headers.

Cheers.

ProbablePrime

KevinTheJedi I asked on Server Fault about this particular issue(https://serverfault.com/questions/1153290/add-original-message-id-to-headers-in-a-postfix-bounce) and a kind user explained that this might be better fixed within OSTicket as my mail server(postfix), is complying with a bunch of RFCs related to Delivery Notifications.

I can probably get something going by editing OSTicket but I'm wondering if this should be made an actual issue on the GitHub for OSTicket.

Or alternatively, if you think this is something I should solve on my mail server do let me know too.

KevinTheJedi

ProbablePrime

Well I see bounce backs get threaded through in some cases. You can see the methods we use to match here:

And where we call them here:

https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/blob/develop/include/api.tickets.php#L187-L204

Cheers.

KevinTheJedi

ProbablePrime

So it checks the References, In-Reply-To, and Message-Id headers first then if no match it tries to find the Ticket number in the subject, then it moves on to checking the body for a message-id. If all of that fails then it creates a new ticket.

Cheers.

ProbablePrime

I have diagnosed this further and opened a PR on osTicket to address it: https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/pull/6663