Enable Support form to Communicate with RT APIs, investigate external tool for Support Form

[djbrooke]

The support form at dataverse.harvard.edu currently relays messages in a way that is running afoul of spam filters by using the user’s email as the return address and with mismatched domain headers. We can expect that other installations may run into this as well. We should investigate a configuration that allows the support form to communicate with support ticketing systems via API or some other method instead of generating an email with mismatched headers. For this first iteration I’m interested in setting up something with RT:

https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker https://rt-wiki.bestpractical.com/wiki/REST#Java https://docs.opennms.org/opennms/releases/27.1.0/javadoc/org/opennms/netmgt/rt/RequestTracker.html

[djbrooke]

• RT system at Harvard IQSS is currently is running spamassassin - could we allow for traffic from the two app servers.
• Investigate proper use of from/reply to - this is running up the spam score
• In the past, spam has been an issue because of posting the email address - the genesis of the contact form
• It may be possible to modularize here - we'd be interested in RT, but others could add ServiceNow or Zendesk or whatever
• We should see if other installations are OK with the dropping of support for the relay that's causing the spam checks to fail in RT
• @landreev and @qqmyers to connect about how RT is handling reply-to

[landreev]

Based on the discussions today, the actual solution, as a delivery for the next release, may be something along the lines of:

1) If the installation deploys the release and chooses to do nothing, everything stays as it is now: The form keeps generating an email, with the user's email address put into the "Reply-To:" header. 2) If they choose to configure the "use RT for support requests" option, the form opens a new RT ticket via REST API. 3) If they are not using RT, they have an additional new option: "do-not-use-reply-to" - in which case the form keeps sending email, but without the extra header. (And adds the user's email address to the message text).

Kinda straightforward/not unnecessarily disruptive - ?

[djbrooke]

@landreev that sounds great.

• it would Harvard to move to RT-based communication in order to solve our problem. This could be modularized to other ticketing systems in the future.
• it would allow those who do not currently have spam-filter issues with putting the user's email address put into the "Reply-To:" header to continue to do that
• it would provide the additional option you mention to still allow email-based delivery while not running afoul of spam filters

👍

[djbrooke]

• the external tool piece is a consideration because we want to be mindful of what we want in the core code (do we want RT API calls in the code?). If we go with an external tool (this would be different than other external tools! :)), we'd have to decide on some default here.
• SPI may be a solution here, but we could also allow people to put HTML in to allow any form - this would allow people to embed forms of their choosing. Could we write an XHTML (customsupport.xhtml) page for this? We could also add a Java class for this and expand later.
• We could use this as the first use case for an event framework - there is some use of setting up a message queue beyond this (ex. LDN for Harvard Data Commons)
• RT was installed at Odum and no one used it, there is a general desire to move away from email -
• Should we just use a mailto:support@dataverse.harvard.edu with a link?
• @djbrooke to check with Bill about allowing email from this address (without opening up it up more broadly, adding the two servers to the allowed list)

[stevenmce]

ADA would be interested in this for the purposes of linking to our ticketing system as well - OSTicket (https://github.com/osTicket)

[cmbz]

@stevenmce are you still interested in this feature?

[cmbz]

@sbarbosadataverse Are you still encountering the problem of our emails sent via the support form ending up in users' spam folders?