Looking for a non-intrusive personal email ticket tracker
April 10th, 2007 by Samuel TardieuI am in search for the perfect non-intrusive personal email ticket tracker system. Many people send me email which require me to do some things before I can either answer them or provide them with a definite solution. Right now, I put those emails in a “avoir” (”to see” in French) folder which grows continously as I easily forget to remove things from them when it’s done. Also, it is now so big that I have trouble navigating through it.
I am in the need of a real ticket tracking system which would allow me to prioritize such requests, set deadlines and so on. This system would need to be non-intrusive as I do not want people to have to do anything but reply to emails from me; in particular, I don’t want to change the subject line nor ask them to use another email address. It would also have to work if several people are in copy.
I already keep archives of all my incoming and outgoing emails. The idea would be for me to bounce an email which requires further processing to a known-only-by-me address which would open a new ticket. Any email following this one in the same thread, even if it has arrived on my system already, would need to be added to the newly created ticket. Using the In-Reply-To and References field should be enough to get anything related to the starting email (which may not be the first one in a thread).
In order to achieve that, I would need to record, each time an email arrives, its Message-Id as well as its parent Message-Id. Each time a mail arrives, if it is a direct or indirect successor of a mail that has been used to open a ticket, it would be added automatically to the corresponding issue. A web interface would allow me to prioritize and operate on tickets (e.g., close them).
Is anyone aware of such a beast? (in the Free Software world of course)
April 10th, 2007 at 13:00
Request Tracker http://bestpractical.com/rt/ fits these requirments (specially the “I do not want people to have to do anything but reply to emails from me;”).
On the other hand, it is a bit complicated to install and manage.
April 10th, 2007 at 13:03
Stéphane: I have used Request Tracker in the past, precisely for tracking my personal tasks. However, at this time it added the request number in the subject line and used that to gather the different mails. But maybe a plugin would do. Do you have a particular one in mind?
April 10th, 2007 at 13:29
AFAIK, you cannot prevent RT to modify the subject field.
To sort out between different tasks, RT can use the subject line *or* the destination mailbox (task+321@rt.rfc1149.net will file the email under task #321). Use ‘–extension ticket’ when invoking rt-mailgate.
April 10th, 2007 at 13:33
Samuel -
Your post to the RT-Users mailing list sent me this way. I would agree with Stéphane about RT - it is both complicated and powerful. I think you would have to do some work in the code for it to work without the ticket ID in the subject. I personally use RT for managing not only my personal to-do list but also the to-do lists of all my employees. I run a web design firm, we have to keep track of dozens of clients emailing requests for work done on their pages. When I was the only employee I tracked it all in my personal email, but even before I hired help that became unmanageable. I’ve tried a dozen other ticketing systems and RT is the best I’ve found. I’ve built my entire billing system (both monies due to employees and from clients) around it.
For a simpler system, have you looked at GMail?
April 10th, 2007 at 13:40
Chris: Gmail won’t do it, I really need priorities and so on. I think I’ll work around RT somehow. The fact that it changes the subject line may not be a problem (as I don’t want RT to send mail directly, just to accumulate them). An additional system based on tracking the incoming messages and send them to RT may be the simplest way to go.
April 10th, 2007 at 13:43
> An additional system based on tracking the incoming messages and send them to RT may be the simplest way to go.
Hashing the concatenation of (From: + Subject:), and then mapping the hash value to a ticket, might be sufficient.
OTOH, people modify the subject and people do change their From… There is probably a reason why all email ticketing systems use an unique identifier and put it in the headers.
In-Reply-To or References may seem safer but many people write a message from scratch rather than replying.
April 10th, 2007 at 21:59
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems (noticed by Kim Minh Kaplan)
Just checking those who have “email” as the user interface may give ideas…
April 11th, 2007 at 8:35
Another solution (recommended on another mailing list) is to use an online email service, several provide some sort of task-tracking features. See a good summary in:
http://itredux.com/blog/2007/03/05/email-roundup/
Do note that GTD seems to be the TLA of the moment
April 12th, 2007 at 6:44
please let us know what you end up going with (i’m sure i’m not the only reader curious to know!)
April 12th, 2007 at 21:38
a “avoir” (”to see” in French) folder
Oh. My. God. Tu corriges cette hoooooorrible faute ou je te dénonce vite fait à Koz’ !
April 13th, 2007 at 9:26
???
April 16th, 2007 at 0:10
Bah je me suis fait la remarque aussi : “à voir” semblerait une traduction plus exacte, non ? Et puis en anglais, je verrais plutôt un “to do” (voire “todo” à la limite et pour le coup) que “to see”.
Maintenant, j’ignore quels liens entre les différents protagonistes poussent palpatine à brandir la menace d’une dénonciation à Kozlika (si c’est bien d’elle qu’il s’agit)…
April 19th, 2007 at 0:18
Koz’ est correctrice orthographique, dans la vraie vie (c’est comme ça qu’on dit ? ^^), et comme Samuel est toujours dans le coin… Bref, “à voir” == “to see” (et “avoir” == “to have”, mais on s’en fout). J’ai mis trop de temps à comprendre ce que voulais dire la phrase, en plus (mon mode “auto-correction” est lamentable, j’avoue ; c’est pour ça que je communique très peu par SMS, d’ailleurs, comprends jamais ce que ça raconte…), d’où mon indignation :D.
April 20th, 2007 at 14:33
Le système que j’utilisais à l’époque ne permettait ni les accents ni les espaces dans les noms des dossiers. J’ai donc choisi “avoir” plutôt que “à voir”, ce n’est pas une faute. C’est l’abbréviation de “à voir plus tard”, ou “to see later”.
Et je ne comprends pas la remarque « et comme Samuel est toujours dans le coin », étant donné que je n’ai pas parlé avec Kozlika depuis notre dernière sortie à l’opéra il me semble, et je ne l’ai croisée qu’une fois depuis à l’avant-dernier Paris-Carnet.
April 22nd, 2007 at 2:17
Aaahhhh. Mais ça donne un truc horrible du coup ^^ (et puis, tout est en utf-8, maintenant
). Au fait, tu viens au prochain Paris-Carnet, puisqu’il en est mention ? (désolé pour les comm’ tous les 3 jours, c’est un peu la folie en ce moment 
).
June 21st, 2007 at 22:13
Wow, this thread just turned into French all of a sudden. Lost you guys there. Anyhow, thanks for the Wikipedia link, really useful.
February 27th, 2008 at 19:58
I was looking for the same thing. Yesterday I published a patch that will allow RT3 to be used in exactly this fashion. You can look it up in the list archives, one of which is here:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/rt/devel/72286
The patch applies to the Email.pm file in RT3’s Interfaces directory. Once applied, you can remove the scrips from RT3 that “notify requestor” on correspondence, so that it doesn’t send out messages with modified subject lines. Then configure your mail system so that it delivers a copy of each message to the rt-mailgate script in addition to the copy it sends to you. CC or BCC your system on your replies so that RT3 can track those messages as well.