A plugin utilizing email piping to allow ticket creation in Woothemes’ Supportpress via incoming email. We used elements of the ostickets piping functionality – big props go to Peter Rotich of ostickets. This plugin makes SupportPress easier for your customers to use. Instead of forcing all users to log into your company’s SupportPress dashboard to submit a ticket, they can simply email their issue/request to <[email protected]> or any other email you’d like.
You’ll need control of your mail server. We have tested this with our postfix email server and it works well. We’ve included directions below…
The automailer script that runs on the mail server whenever an email is received at the configured email address is written in php, so you’ll need php cli installed on the mail server with curl installed as well. You don’t need a webserver installed on the mail server, just php cli should be fine.
We are working on ways to make this easier, specifically a hosted service that does all of the piping bits seamlessly – allow you’d have to do is forward your <[email protected]> email to a provided autogenerated address hosted on our servers, enter the valid authentication keys, and be done with configuration. More on this later…
Here’s How it Works
Customer emails support@<yourcompany.com> with a request for help/bug report/etc. Your email server pipes the email to automailer.php (or automail.pl script depending on your preference) script loaded on the email server. The script recieves the message, and sends a curl request to the plugin running on your site. You configure the plugin to only accept mail from one ip address, and you create a sufficiently long password that’s present in both the automailer script and in the WordPress dashboard to prevent unauthorized emails coming in. The plugin checks to see if the incoming email is present in the registered users section, and if so, creates a new ticket and assigns the ticket to the default user in Supportpress. If not, the user is told to register and to try to send the email again once registration has been completed. All correspondance with the user appends ticket numbers to the subject line, so customers can simply reply to emails dispatched by Supportpress and see their responses appear inline in the respective ticket thread. Attachments can be enabled or disabled in the admin settings section. When Attachments are allowed, and the customer attaches a file, it is uploaded to the server and shown under the ticket info above the thread in the usual spot.
Future Plans
The plugin is, in essence an email piping plugin, so I’m not really concerned with the sending of emails. Of course, to make a good mechanism for piping, I needed to manipulate a few of the outgoing emails to tack on a ticket id, but for the most part if you want to customize which emails go out to the customers at which point you’ll need to rely on another plugin. This plugin’s primary concern is that incoming emails (with, or without a ticket tag) are added successfully to the support ticketing system. In a future update I intend to expand the emailing options set, but for now I am comfortable with the basic config.