Creating tickets by email is a very powerful feature we introduced lately, but the out-of-office auto-reply emails created a problem. Since after the ticket creation the sender gets an email notification, this created the “auto-reply loop” — when tickets keep getting created, assuming the automated emails are “real” ones.
This issue is not easy to address — automated emails, like out-of-office auto-replies, do not have a unified format. There is no sure way for a computer to separate them from “real” emails.
To solve this issue, we approached it from another side. Now we compare new emails with the previous ones, and, if the emails are a total match (same subject-body), we do not process those emails (no new tickets are created from them). This should prevent the “auto-reply loop” from happening (since auto-replies have identical content), as well as stopping any duplicate emails re-sent by mistake.
Let us know if you experience any problems with automatic emails. Please note that the first auto-reply will still go through – which actually can be valuable, since it logs the fact that the user is out of office, for example.