Our organization has
been using OTRS (currently 1.3.6) for about a year. In that time we have
had 3 occasions where massive email loops have created many thousands of tickets
(110,000+ in the latest occurrence) and spewed out an even greater number of
unnecessary emails. Cleaning up the unwanted tickets and emails, and
calming down overwhelmed colleagues, has been as annoying and
time-consuming as you would expect.
I understand there
is a loop protection feature in OTRS (currently configured with the default
value of 40), but that doesn't seem to prevent this problem.
Some details about
our configuration:
-- a cron task reads
from a POP mailbox every 2 minutes and creates tickets from any emails
received.
-- an
auto-acknowledgement is sent to the originator of emails that are
received.
-- an automated
alert email is sent to agents who have activated the queue in their "My Queues"
preference.
In the latest loop
episode, an individual unthinkingly forwarded his personal email address to the
one read by OTRS. This precipitated the endless loop (which started on a
Friday evening and was not discovered until the following Monday morning).
Each acknowledgement email was creating a new ticket.
Can anyone offer
suggestions on how to prevent such loops from occurring? (We already have
an email filter in OTRS that discards "Out of Office"
email responses (which were a cause of one of our prior loop
episodes.) And does 2.0.2 have better capabilities than 1.3.x for this
purpose?
(And one
related question: When we created a generic agent script to delete the
bogus tickets, it would only do so 1,000 at a time. Where is this limit
imposed, and is it possible to relax it?)
--Jim
Edlin
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Jim Edlin
Tides, Inc.
415-561-6304 v
415-561-6301 f