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Ticketing system
Hello,
Currently writing my own billing system (PHP) and now came to support module. I have a question what would be the best practice to pipe emails. I mean how to identify received email and add it to the ticket? My thoughts is to implement one of these:
- Add some sort of UID to the subject of the message;
- Add reply-to with [email protected] message box which will correspond to a specific ticket;
Comments
No doubt you have a lot of free time. Why would you..
Indeed, but that's not a topic at the moment
Most go for the UID in the subject line as its easier to do and if you were to do it on the reply address you would then have to assume that you or the end user would have a catch all address setup for that domain otherwise it would get bounced.
With the UID in the subject line you know what you are looking for and can just match the subject line up to your database table.
+1 here
No way is perfect, every method you can possibly imagine will have an edge case that pisses off one out of 10,000 people. Best effort here is important, don’t spend too much time over thinking it.
I would match the UID in the subject and the sender's e-mail address(es) to make sure they are the owner of the ticket/account to avoid spam or phishing attempts.
@KuJoe in an ideal world I would agree with you.
However, what if the email was originally created from a group address and then replied to from your personal address.
Two options either bounce the eMail back or change the matching to the domain and the UID.
Again over thinking but just trying to think of all possible future issues.
I would use a catch-all pop box on a subdomain {GUID}@tickets.domain.com
@redit the software should allow for multiple users and thus multiple e-mail addresses. Problem solved.
You're writing a billing system, not a ticket system. So for tickets, I'd suggest just integrating an existing solution like request-tracker with your software. For request-tracker, there's a PHP client library here: https://github.com/dersam/RTPHPLib
support+{GUID}@domain.com
@perennate massive thank you for link! That lib is a monster.