Vendor "#nnnn" ticket ID format conflicting with ours

gberthold

Hi,

We have at least 2 vendors whose helpdesk systems use the same "#nnnn" ticket ID format as our Atera instance, so certain emails to/from them create duplicates for us, and possibly them. Have already set Atera to ignore email from 2 x vendor’s helpdesk systems but that doesn’t solve the very common scenario where anyone (us or vendor) replies to an email with their reference number in the subject, cc’ing our Atera helpdesk, so Atera gets updated too (which we want).

Even if our ticket ID was also in the subject line as “[#3902]” it would confuse one or both helpdesk systems. Presumably each helpdesk system reads the subject line characters left to right and would detect and try to process the first/leftmost ID it found, usually not ours.

So “Subject: Re: Vendor Ticket [#403998]: OPV issues [#3902]” would not work, as Atera would detect [#403998] in the subject, not find ticket [#403998] in Atera, and create a duplicate.

In other helpdesk systems we were able to change our helpdesk ID format to ##123 or #123# so our helpdesk can parse the subject line and reliably find our ID anywhere in the subject.

How can we avoid these duplicate tickets without having the option of custom ID format? No point having a helpdesk system if we need to cc everyone who may ever need to know about an issue so they can have access to the history if needed.

Have raised with support but no joy thus far.

What am I missing??

Thanks!

Grant

gberthold

And … blocking the vendor support account doesn't help because all their email updates come from "support@myvendorname.com.au" not their personal accounts, so our ticket in Atera is now out of the loop. Will be the same for us when we send updates from Atera to vendors.

How have others resolved this without email loops or incomplete email trails in Atera? I've inherited Atera in this new role, and fast falling out of love with it.

mjones

Generally, ticketing systems emailing each other is a bad idea.

When I worked at a Connectwise shop, we would exclude the vendor\other system email address from auto-replies so it wouldn't "echo", but I don't think that is an option in Atera, at least on the front end.

Personally haven't run into this myself so I don't have any advice on it specifically.

Sarah_from_Atera

Hi @gberthold , Sarah from Atera here.

You can try to follow this article, and add the ticket number in the subject of the email.

You can also attempt to add the helpdesk email address in TO instead of CC.

If these do not work, please reach out to our support to see if a better solution can be found.