Eric Willis’ response to this question:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/563041/receive-emails-in-a-net-service-c
prompted me to start thinking of creating a general purpose (initially for trac only) autoresponder and issue creator that listens to some ‘support’ email account, creates an issue in your issue tracker and responds to the client with the issue id. (I like fogbugz implementation but I have other projects that can’t afford the license)
I am thinking of open sourcing this, so please let me know if there is another effort/project.
The goal is to make this generic to be able to use a number of different inputs (pop email for now) and a number of different issue trackers (trac for now)
I also think having it do the ‘whine’ like bugzilla and others have (weekly/periodic emails for open assigned tasks) – or perhaps that is just another service that shares code…
So, I think the question is: does anyone know of an existing open source project? If not I think i will start one. I might do it in .NET/Mono, but I am not sure what the implications are for that for running as a service and what that means for non Win32 OS…
I suspect the biggest issues will be:
- spam and how/where to handle that
- outgoing email integration – email from your support to client and integrating with issue (CC field works, but is not ideal)
- Parsing emails to the support address so as to only add the new information and not the existing – particularly when email is mixed with question/response…
It already exists for trac. It’s called email2trac
I just looked at my ticket e-mails from email2trac and the ticket number is in the subject line.