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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0002177mantisbtemailpublic2004-08-29 01:53
Reporterpathway Assigned Tojlatour  
PrioritynormalSeverityfeatureReproducibilityalways
Status closedResolutionduplicate 
Summary0002177: Replying to an Email should make a comment in the bugnotes.
Description

This is a feature request. The feature I want is the ability to reply to an email sent by Mantis, and the reply to be posted in the bugnotes. To accomidate this, all bugnote emails that are currently sent out should not have the entire heading of the bug, but only a link to the bug and the comment.

Additional Information

This change would allow users the ability to enter their info without entering the Mantis webpage. While the interface for Mantis is much improved over other UGLY bug trackers, it is still a bit daunting to somebody who has never experianced using one. Plus, if this feature is implemented, you'll have at least one more user of your software. I'm looking forward to this.

TagsNo tags attached.

Relationships

duplicate of 0001568 closedgrangeway Abillity to send mail to mantis adding bugs and bugnotes 

Activities

vboctor

vboctor

2002-07-03 22:56

manager   ~0002933

Changed category to email.

Luebbe

Luebbe

2002-07-08 07:48

reporter   ~0002954

I second this request. Some users do not understand, that replying to a mail will not work and complain that they have "answered" the mail which told them the bug's status was set to feedback.
I have found some bits of code on the web which uses perl to extract mail header and body information ands stuffs it into a mysql database. I don't have time to do it myself, but I can place it here if anyone is interested.

pathway

pathway

2002-07-08 13:29

reporter   ~0002957

The only issue-tracking system I knew to be able to do this was Arsdigita Comunity System's (ACS's) Trouble-Ticket system (FYI: Redhat owns ACS now). That system was based on Tcl and Oracle (Now Java). Since ACS was/is open source, looking to see how they did it may help. Also, OpenACS may be able to give hints.

http://openacs.org/

Luebbe

Luebbe

2002-09-06 02:06

reporter   ~0003241

In the meantime I also found some code in PHP, that can stuff incoming mails into a database

hacker

hacker

2002-09-20 06:42

reporter   ~0003293

My question is... why? Email is email, and bugtracking is bugtracking.

Unless you're talking about adding an email-ONLY interface to Mantis, none of this makes sense. These are status messages, not action messages. The reason they include the link IN the message, is so you can go back to the original bug it references, and make your notes there. Is that so hard for users?

Also, there is a way to stop users from replying to bug emails, set the Reply-To to a non-deliverable address, such as bugs-NOREPLY@yourproject.org. I've done that, and we have hundreds of users (incredibly stupid users too) and bugs, and never once have we had someone reply to the email itself. They know to go to the bugtracker first. Another option is to set the Reply-To to map back to the recipient of the bug report. If they reply, they are replying to themselves. That would probably be too confusing for most newbie users though.

Now, that being said, you can certainly write up some code that extracts the email headers, body, etc. and puts it wherever you want, and set that as a script in /etc/mail/aliases, such as:

bugs-reply: "|/var/mantis/bugsreply.pl"

Then using Mail::Internet and MIME::Lite (perl modules), you could easily dissect the bits you need. I've done this for one of my own projects (an email-only interface to Plucker). It looks like this:

my $message = new Mail::Internet ([<>]);
my $from = $message->get('From');
my $subject = $message->get('Subject');
my $received = $message->get('Received');
my @body = @{$message->body()};

Then just toss the bits you need into the db, etc. or submit the bug report however you want using those values. The problem with this, is that it's Unix and POSIX specific. I'm not sure how to do the same sort of hook on incoming mail for an Exchange server on Win32 systems.

I've created a small script already that allows our users to submit "anonymous" bugs into the system from a shell-based perl script. It works like a champ so far, and once I clean it up, I'll contribute it to the core Mantis project.