RT 5.0.7 Documentation
Email management
RT and Email
Nearly all RT instances are set up to receive and send email for communication on tickets and many other notification scenarios. Often the email addresses RT receives email from are used by end users to communicate with you about their tickets. Whether it's for support (support@example.com) or security (incident@example.com), these emails go directly into RT and either create a new ticket or add a note to an existing ticket.
RT also sends email to notify the people connected to a ticket (watchers) that a new message has been added. The result is that your team all gets notified as if they received the email directly, but it's all tracked in RT. People can be added and removed from the ticket to manage notifications through the life of the ticket.
Email Warnings and Errors
Just as with your regular email, there are various things that can happen to interfere with email received by, or sent out from, RT. If you are the RT administrator, the first thing you need to do to troubleshoot these issues is to be aware of them.
To receive an email from RT when it finds an email issue, set the "OwnerEmail" in RT_Config configuration option to your email address. You should use an email address that specifically goes to a person. Do not set this to an RT email address since it's being sent because RT has detected an email issue.
In RT 5.0.1 and earlier, OwnerEmail would also be displayed on the default RT login page for users who might have issues logging in. Starting in RT 5.0.2, "RTSupportEmail" in RT_Config controls the email shown on the login page, so you can set OwnerEmail without it being displayed.
Below are some of the different types of email notifications you might receive from RT.
Rights Notifications
RT has various rights that manage how users can interact with the system, including CreateTicket, ReplyToTicket, and CommentOnTicket. If a user sends an email to an RT email address and that user (identified by their From address) doesn't have rights to create a ticket, RT will automatically send a reply explaining that they don't have rights. If you have OwnerEmail set, you will also get an email.
This is a good way to confirm you have your rights set correctly. If you restrict your RT, it maybe be perfectly OK to prevent unknown users from creating or updating tickets. Receiving a notification email is a good way to confirm you aren't blocking someone who should have access.
Bounced Email
Sometimes when we send email, the email server that receives it may detect a problem of some sort and "bounce" it back with an error message. That automatic response email from the remote server can come back to RT looking like a normal ticket reply. If RT posts that to the ticket, another email could go out which will generate the same error response. This back and forth is called an "email loop" and it can continue until one of the servers starts to have problems.
To prevent this, RT works to detect incoming email that looks like a bounce and prevent it from getting added to tickets, avoiding these loops. To further refine this behavior, RT also has the options "LoopsToRTOwner" in RT_Config and "StoreLoops" in RT_Config.
Bounces usually result from some issue with a recipient address. This could be a typo in the email address itself, or the recipient may no longer be at that company so their email account is inactive. The solution for these cases is to fix the incorrect email address on the RT user record or remove the user with the inactive email address from the ticket so RT will stop sending email to that address.
In some cases, an email address for another automated system or even one of RT's own email addresses, can get added as a watcher on a ticket. These can also result in automated email replies or bounces and the solution is to remove them from roles (Requestors, Cc, etc.) on the ticket.
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