Redmine Helpdesk

Lightweight helpdesk plugin for redmine. Adds the email sender-address of an anonymous supportclient to the custom field 'owner-email' of a ticket which was created by a support email. Answers can be send to the supportclient by checking the support checkbox on a journal.

Features

No need to create any user accounts for anonymous user
Support for sending an email notification to the (anonymous user) supportclient on ticket creation
A standard first reply message can be send to the supportclient on ticket creation (optional, per project)
The email-footer for the email notification to the supportclient can be adjusted (optional, per project)
The email-footer can be customized by using the following placeholders: %USER_FIRST_NAME%, %USER_LAST_NAME%, %USER_EMAIL%, %USER_LOGIN%, %USER_CF_...% for all user custom fields
The sender email-address can be adjusted (optional, per project)
Internal communication is not send to the supportclient
The supportclient will get an email notification if the support checkbox on the journal is checked
Journal attachments will be delivered too

Screenshot

Getting the plugin

A copy of the plugin can be downloaded from GitHub: http://github.com/jfqd/redmine_helpdesk

Installation

To install the plugin clone the repo from github and migrate the database:

cd /path/to/redmine/
git clone git://github.com/jfqd/redmine_helpdesk.git plugins/redmine_helpdesk
rake redmine:plugins:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

To uninstall the plugin migrate the database back and remove the plugin:

cd /path/to/redmine/
rake redmine:plugins:migrate NAME=redmine_helpdesk VERSION=0 RAILS_ENV=production
rm -rf plugins/redmine_helpdesk

Further information about plugin installation can be found at: http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/Plugins

Usage

To use the helpdesk functionality you need to

add the custom field 'owner-email' to a project in the project configuration
add a standard first reply message into the custom_field 'helpdesk-first-reply' in the project configuration (optional)
add an email-footer into the custom_field 'helpdesk-email-footer' in the project configuration
add a sender email address into the custom_field 'helpdesk-sender-email' in the project configuration (optional)
make sure 'Issue added' and 'Issue updated' in the general redmine settings for email notifications are checked
add the permission 'Treat as supportclient' to all roles you want to be treated as supportclient (the permission is automatically added to the 'Anonymous' role)
disable standard notifications for non-anonymous supportclients to prevent their spamming (optional)
add a cronjob for creating issues from support emails

Cronjob

Creating tickets from support emails through an IMAP-account is done by a cronjob. The following syntax is for ubuntu or debian linux:

*/5 * * * * redmine /usr/bin/rake -f /path/to/redmine/Rakefile --silent redmine:email:receive_imap RAILS_ENV="production" host=mail.example.com port=993 username=username password=password ssl=true project=project_identifier folder=INBOX move_on_success=processed move_on_failure=failed no_permission_check=1 unknown_user=accept 1 > /dev/null

Further information about receiving emails with redmine can be found at: http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineReceivingEmails

Please note that forwarding emails with rdm-mailhandler.rb is currently not supported by the plugin.

Compatibility

The latest version of this plugin is only compatible with Redmine 2.4.x., 2.5.x, 2.6.x, 3.0.x.

If you prefer to run Redmine with JRuby make sure to use Redmine versions prior to 3.0.x!

A version for Redmine 1.2.x. up to 1.4.7. is tagged with v1.4 and available for download on github.
A version for Redmine 2.3.x is tagged with v2.3 and available for download on github.
A version for Redmine 2.4.x and 2.5.x is tagged with v2.5 and available for download on github.

Contribution

avoidik - Add missed Russian translation into roles and access manager
WhereIsPedro - Polish translation
vilppuvuorinen - 3.0.x compatibility
vilppuvuorinen - Unit and functional tests with travis and code climate support
ssidelnikov - Make sure that the notes length is always calculated
nifuki - Fixed bug trying to send an email with empty notes
nifuki - Fixed non-working helpdesk-send-to-owner-default checkbox
box789 - Russian translation
seqizz - Turkish translation
benstwa - 'send' should be 'sent'
davidef - Add setting for handling sent to owner default value
Craig Gowing - Redmine 2.4 compatibility
Barbazul - Added reply-to header
Orchitech Solutions - Added issue matching based on standard MIME header references
Orchitech Solutions - Added support for non-anonymous supportclients (sponsored by ISIC Global Office)
Orchitech Solutions - Added support for customizable email footers (sponsored by ISIC Global Office)
Orchitech Solutions - Added support for tracking email details (sponsored by ISIC Global Office)

License

This plugin is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE-file for details.

nixmomo/redmine_helpdesk