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Sometimes customers email our support address and cc their collegues who then reply-all to the original email which results in a second (or third or fourth) bug getting logged in FogBugz.

Is their a way around this? Perhaps some way of stopping new bugs getting logged if they have the same subject (even though there is no bug number in the subject).

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I'm getting bitten by this. I just evangelized the team on the coolness of emailing bug reports to FogBugz, and now I discovered this problem which is creating duplicate bugs. Please fix this -- the Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References headers are there to help. – Jens Alfke Dec 8 2010 at 0:29
Same problem here. Our company is currently discussing whether we should use fogbugz or trac. One of the strong point going for fogbugz is "it does what we want out of the box", but in this case, it does not! – Johann Deneux Mar 31 2011 at 12:15

4 Answers

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Unfortunately there is no great solution to this problem at the moment. The FogBugz mailbox functionality was original built on some basic assumptions, one of them being that an incoming e-mail to FogBugz would result in a 1:1 dialog.

In order to solve the problem you're describing, FogBugz needs to be able to figure out whether a new incoming e-mail without a case number is for a new case or is somehow related to an existing one. Determining whether two emails are related is important, and we certainly want to improve how FogBugz does this, but it is not currently at the top of our priority list as the existing framework works well in most cases.

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1 
 What about holding some messages (or able to configure the filter) for moderation? – Kris K. Feb 19 2010 at 14:45
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Hi,

In case you find a working solution, I'd be very interested in it, we face the same problem. Basically it should be to hard for fogbugz to act like this based on the References: Header field.

regards Alex

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This is a bit of a management headache within FogBugz - basically selecting all related emails in the UI, and making their parent case the original email seems the only way to put them together.

It however becomes very difficult to track the flow of the email conversation in this way. It would be really useful if it could recognise Re: or Fwd: prefixed emails with a subject already seen, and add them to a conversation-style view of the issue, interspersed with any using the correct case number etc.

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One workaround for this would be to make it so the email server that is populating the POP3 mailbox rejects all such email. This is not too hard to configure if you are using Exim on your mail server.

Basically, you'd only accept email to the fogbugz address if...

  1. There is no cc: field and the To: field only contains the fogbugz address and no other addresses, or
  2. The fogbugz address does not show up in either the To: field or cc: field (ie, it was bcc'ed, and you don't have to worry about anyone else sending any more reply-all's to it).
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This doesn't sound like it would work. In the situation described by the OP, the original support ticket wouldn't get into the system because the user CC'd other people. – JohnFx♦ Feb 19 2010 at 14:55
That's part of the solution. The OP would get a bounce which would have an appropriate error message to teach them not to do that in the future. It will also reject all subsequent "reply alls" from other people besides the OP. Any solution once the message is accepted is likely to be complicated. – Todd Day Feb 20 2010 at 4:40
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 Poor solution. How can you reasonably expect your customers and prospects not to CC people when sending you emails?? – danielm Mar 14 2011 at 21:04
My workaround isn't great, but it does address the question, and it is all you can do in the absence of a real fix from FogCreek. – Todd Day Apr 18 2011 at 16:38

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