Question

We fairly recently began using FogBugz for support emails from our clients and have run into an issue since many of them are used to using our personal email addresses.

The problem is that someone will send an email to one or more of our personal emails and also cc our fogbugz email. This will create a new case and sometimes one of us doesn't notice and sends a response, which creates another case.

I know one solution involving no fogbugz changes would be to convince our clients to use the email properly and make sure everyone is diligent about not hitting reply-all when our fogbugz email is included. Is there a way to help force this with the system though? One idea was not creating a new case if the fogbugz email is in the cc field. Then we can respond or open a new case for it ourselves.

This is a similar discussion: http://fogbugz.stackexchange.com/questions/2018/how-can-i-prevent-multiple-cases-from-being-opened-when-a-fogbugz-customer-ccs-t

Answer 1

Another workaround that may help is the Case Event Merge plugin.

Answer 2

We came up with a solution that works pretty well.

Our email server is Exchange 2010, so we set up a new folder called "processed" and a new server-side rule.

The rule is triggered if our fogbugz email is in the cc field and not in the to field. The rule first sends an auto-reply message so the sender knows their email was not delivered. It also serves to train users not to CC our fogbugz email.

You sent an email to our support system (support@ourdomain.com) as a "CC" instead of the main "To" recipient.

This account only accepts messages where it is the primary "To" recipient. If you intended to create a new support case, please resend your email with support@ourdomain.com in the "To" field. If you did not intend to create a new case or were contacting someone else personally, you may ignore this message.

The rule also moves the email to the processed directory which is set to auto-delete messages after 30 days.

We first tried deleting the email immediately since there's no reason to hold on to it, but Exchange handles deletes differently and leaves the message in the inbox for a few seconds giving FogBugz time to pick up the message sometimes. By replacing the delete with a folder move, Exchange skips the inbox entirely and new cases are never created when the rule is triggered. Also, the email auto-reply type needs to be a "specific message" and not a "specific template" or else it won't run server-side.