Any ticket add-on similar to this one?

The email part of this is tricky. I cross-posted this in Slack as well, but no one seems to have a solution right now. I’m not sure how the old Help Desk add-on handled emails as well. You’d have to have something to receive the email and then route it as needed.

The way this usually works is that you set up your email account to pipe to a PHP file. The PHP file parses the email.

Example: php /path/to/pipe.php

Every time a messages comes in, it goes directly to the PHP file.

There are multiple PHP mail parsers on GitHub.

Reading directly from an email account would be far more complicated, but most systems just are set up to pipe to a file, this can be setup easily on most email servers, like Exim or Postfix.

It would then convert the message into HTML and display as a ticket. Attachments are usually ignored as that also involves more complexity.

I’m about to right a blog post on this.

I accomplish this very thing using the first-party Moblog module (which works in EE6, can’t recall if the latest 5 has a working version)

https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/add-ons/moblog.html

That will be cool to see. I thought about Moblog. Guess I don’t have enough experience to implement it for different users sending in emails.

You are correct. The Moblog module basically does something very similar. Maybe this can be used. Great idea.

I have not researched this yet but reading the Moblog Add-On: https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/add-ons/moblog.html

I actually think Moblog could potentially solve the email parsing part.

If the Moblog add-on is modified to check the incoming FROM email header for a member email field then this could potentially be used as the basic for an incoming support ticket system.

Example:

Email is received to modified Moblog add-on, checks email for an EE member (customer).

If a match is registered, the message is accepted and the entry is created in a channel assigned to that specific member. User can then log in and view his tickets and staff can reply to the channel from inside EE.

If another email is received and no email address is found, Moblog rejects the entry, maybe emailing back the user that tickets are only for registered members.

Of course if you want to accept tickets from everyone its even more simple as all emails are accepted as entries, but you would probably deal with spam messages so be sure to have a proper spam filter in place. But that would be an issue with any other ticket system as well.

I think Moblog actually takes the hard part out of the equation which is parsing incoming emails and it creates half of the work already by being able to create entries on a channel with that content, and it also seems to handle attachments.

The other part would be basically relating that specific entry to that member only (for his eyes only) and sending an email back to the user (you could read the FROM email posted in the entry) when someone replies to that entry.

As for the add-on I posted here, the developer claims it’s not supported anymore in EE as it would take too much work to upgrade since there were too many changes in EE 3. So for anyone reading, that add-on is not compatible or works anymore.

What do you guys think?

following up here that Paul just posted his How To for this to EE:U https://u.expressionengine.com/article/simple-ticketing-system-using-expressionengine-moblog

Wonderful blog article. Thank you!