• Automatically Viewing Unread Messages
• Enabling Unread Messages Indicators
• Displaying Unread Message Indicators in Search Results
• Searching for Tickets with Unread Messages

Automatically Viewing Unread Messages

When viewing a ticket, or looking at a list of tickets you own, you may want to easily see if the Requestor has sent a new message since you last looked at the ticket. RT has a feature to show you these unread messages, both in your searches and on tickets.

There are a few steps to enable this feature and update your searches to show these unread messages.

Enabling Unread Messages Indicators

To enable this feature on your account, go to your preferences page (Logged in as > Settings > Preferences) and set the "Notify me of unread messages" option to "Yes".

After enabling this option, you will see a new section at the top of the ticket display page when you have unread messages on the ticket. You can use the buttons to clear the latest message once you have read it.

The $ShowUnreadMessageNotifications option is also available as a global configuration, so the RT administrator can enable this feature for all users.

Displaying Unread Message Indicators in Search Results

RT provides two special columns that you can add to your search results that indicate that a ticket has unread messages. The "UpdateStatus" column displays Yes or No to indicate the ticket has unread messages.

The "UnreadMessages" column shows the number of unread messages, so if a Requestor has replied two times since you have looked at the ticket, it will show a "2".

See the query builder documentation for details on adding new columns to search results.

Searching for Tickets with Unread Messages

RT also provides some custom ticket search terms to find tickets with unread messages. The term HasUnreadMessages can be used as follows:

    queue = 'General' AND Status = 'open' AND HasUnreadMessages = 'john'

The search term is the RT username of the user with unread messages.

You can use the current user placeholder for this search also:

    queue = 'General' AND Status = 'open' AND HasUnreadMessages = '__CurrentUser__'

To get tickets with no unread messages, use HasNoUnreadMessages.

    queue = 'Support' AND HasNoUnreadMessages='__CurrentUser__'