How does HelpDesk software monitor and handle emails? [closed]

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I know this is an big open question, but I'm more interested in the email functionality of a helpdesk.

If I were to build an online web application / help desk for my site how does the email monitoring work? How would the application retrieve the emails and create or update a ticket based on the ticket ID in the subject line?

I've never understood this and considering the attempt.

Answer 1

You assign some email addresses to the application, then set up email handling to route messages for that address to the application. This can be something simple like running fetchmail to pull email from the inbox on the email server and piping it to the application. Or you can update your email server to forward messages to the helpdesk server and set up an MTA like postfix to accept the messages and pipe them to the helpdesk application.

There are 100's of open source helpdesk applications, so I would recommend finding one in your language of choice and adding a feature rather than re-implementing this one feature. Handling email properly is very difficult because the specs are detailed and confusing, and you'll get a bunch of email that doesn't follow the specs.

If you just want to understand how it works, try setting up one of the open source applications and running some email through it. Turn on debugging and you can then find and read all of the code. Request Tracker (RT) is one option. rt-mailgate is the program that handles email. The basic instructions for setting up email aliases are covered in the README in step 10.