Question

I unfortunately have some customers which have the bad habit of sending support mails to my personal address instead of FogBugz.

So my currect approach is to either manually open a case or mail FogBugz myself - both are not optimal.

Therefore, it would be great if I could just forward the mail without editing it to the FogBugz address, and FogBugz would figure out that this is a mail that needs to be imported:

• The sender (forwarder actually) is a known FogBugz user
• The mail has an empty body (or just whitespace) before the forwarded mail body - just as FogBugz now already recognizes the forwarded parts to be hidden
• Valid header information can be inferred from the Subject, To, CC and From lines

In this case, FogBugz could just "remove the envelope", so that the originally forwarded mail would be inserted along with the correct correspondent. The one which forwarded the mail could be set as case opener.

Since I don't see how I could implement this via plugin I'm posting it as feature request.

EDIT: Now that we have IMAP support, the preferred way of doing this is to simply move the message into the FogBugz mailbox for pick-up.

Answer 1

Preferred Method

Now that FogBugz supports IMAP, the preferred way of doing this is to simply use a mail client to move the message into the FogBugz mailbox for pick-up.

Forwarding Method

FogBugz 7 does support this type of behavior. I've just forwarded emails from Outlook into FogBugz and FogBugz picks up the correct correspondent (the original sender, not me).

Requirements:

• FogBugz looks for the presence of Fwd: or FW: (case-insensitive) in the subject line, so you have to be using a mail client that does this (e.g., if your Outlook is in Swedish, this will put VB: for forwards, which will not be picked up).
• The forward must not have any text before the quoted message, other than whitespace and the quoted message must start with one of these lines:

-----Original Message-----

---------- Forwarded message ----------

----- Forwarded by

------ Forwarded Message

From:

> From:

• The message must be forwarded from an email address that corresponds to a FogBugz user.

Please report problems with this expected behavior as bugs directly to us.

Autoresponses

If you have an autoresponse setup for the mailbox, note that FogBugz will send it to the FogBugz user who forwarded the email, not the original sender. FogBugz will only send emails to people who specifically request them, in this case, the actual person who sent the email to FogBugz. Therefore, the FogBugz user will have to forward the autoresponse back to the original sender.

Disclaimer

Note also that this is intended to be a temporary stopgap while clients learn to stop emailing dave@yourcompany.com, who has always been so helpful but seems overloaded recently, and learn to email the support@yourcompany.com POP3 mailbox, which has three eager new hires just waiting to help them while Dave takes a much-needed rest. This is not intended to be a long-term solution, or to allow you to use a hybrid of your Outlook and FogBugz's built-in mailbox as a way of getting around having to implement a POP3 mailbox.

Since this is intended as a temporary measure, we cannot promise that it will work in all cases, or that we will make it work in all cases. If it doesn't set the right correspondent, please just set it yourself in FogBugz.

Alternative Method

You can also use the the Thunderbird redirect add-on to bounce a message to a new address without altering the headers.

Answer 2

I've not tried this, but I think this might work if you have access to the POP3 mailbox used by Fogbugz for its inbound mail collection. And it depends on your choice of email software, too. But here's the theory...

Tell your email software to mount the POP3 mailbox that Fogbugz uses to get its mail. However, very important, tell it not to remove the mail from the server. If you are using Thunderbird, you can tell it to "Leave message on server". On Outlook, there is a "More Settings" button that has an Advanced tab where you can tell it to "Leave a copy of messages on server".

Now, when you get email that you want to go directly into Fogbugz as if it was sent there, just drag 'n' drop the message onto the Fogbugz inbox that you setup above. In less than a minute, Fogbugz will come around and suck this message out and process it as if it was sent directly to it. One side effect is that you might end up getting a copy of the message that Fogbugz sends out when it gets emails.

I haven't tried this, but I think it will work. Good luck!

-todd-

Answer 3

You should treat this as a first-class feature - salesguys often forward customer email to support since they're the main customer contact point.

Answer 4

For Outlook, there is a plugin that does exactly what you're looking for:

http://weblog.birger.nl/2010/01/updated-fogbugz-outlook-plugin.html

Answer 5

Outlook supports email redirection out of the box. In Outlook 2010 (and probably 2007), open the email in its own window, select the File tab, then click "Resend or Recall". See here for similar instructions for pre-ribbon versions of Outlook.

EDIT: Note, however, the caveat pointed out by @Arsène: you probably can't do this via a Microsoft Exchange account.