Support

Akeeba Ticket System

#39879 Email alias trouble while replying by email (Plugin Fetchmail)

Posted in ‘Akeeba Ticket System for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

Everybody will be able to see its contents. Do not include usernames, passwords or any other sensitive information.

Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.4
PHP version
8.2
Akeeba Ticket System version
5.2.8

Latest post by nicholas on Sunday, 26 November 2023 16:23 CST

marco.marranchelli

The plugin fetchmail works overall very well, but we encounter an issue while the user replies an email with his email alias, which is different than the original email address by submitting the ticket.

Plugin Fetch Email Settings:

  • Reply by email: Yes
  • Create ticket by email: No
  • Track email UID: Yes
  • Text version only: No
  • Delete after post creations: Yes

Issue to reproduce:

  1. submit a ticket on the website with a gmail address: [email protected]
  2. a new ticket is generated in ATS
  3. admin / manager gets notified and replies the ticket -> works fine
  4. the ticket creator gets notified and now tries to reply it with his gmail account
  5. unfortunately google applies his alias address [email protected] instead of [email protected] as sender
  6. a ticket comment won't be generated. Instead of that, the user gets a notification "you are not allowed to create a ticket".

The reason is apparently that a different alias address is applied as the sender address.

Has anyone else already reported the problem? Do you have a solution or some good suggestion to avoid such troubles?

 

 

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

The reply comes from an email address Joomla! does not know about. Therefore, when ATS asks "is there a user with the email address [email protected]" Joomla replies "I have never heard of this email address". As a result, ATS cannot accept this reply and sends back the auto-reply telling the user this is not a recognised email address. This is the expected and desirable behaviour when a random email address sends a "reply" to a ticket.

If we were to allow any random email address to submit a reply to a ticket just by knowing the email address of your ticket system and a monotonically increasing ticket number you would have a spamfest, not a helpdesk.

There are a few different solutions:

  • The user can change their email address on your site.
  • The user can use the add-on email addresses feature in their user profile (provided by ATS' user plugin) to enter all email aliases they will be replying from.
  • The user will have to reply from the same email address they sent their ticket from.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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