Emails from a support system that have the ticket number as the email address

Question

I have seen automated support ticketing systems which will email the user as soon as their ticket is created with a custom email address for that ticket.

For example, support_ticket_1234@example.com

Does postfix support such a system? Are there any examples out there that might explain how this system might work?

Answer 1

Many email systems (sendmail, postfix, and others) support the idea of "address extensions". For example, let's assume my address is "bob@example.com". If my mailer supports address extensions, I may also be able to send email to "bob+some_extension@example.com". The mail still goes to the same places, but the extension is available for filtering. The mail environment feeding a ticket system could be configured with '_' as the extension separator, so that anything addressed to ticket_1234@example.com would get forwarded to the ticketing system, which would use the address extension ("1234") to match the email to an issue.

Another mechanism is to dedicate an entire subdomain to the ticketing system. In this case, instead of email going to ticket_1234@example.com, maybe it would go to ticket_1234@support.example.com. The example.com mail system would be configured to pass all email for support.example.com to the ticket system.

All of these models are used in practice.

Answer 2

This would be better posted at ServerFault.com as Andreas mentioned. In general it is done by routing any address which is not resolved to an existing mailbox to a default mailbox, and then having a script that processes those mails for specific template data.

Answer 3

Yes, postfix supports it.

You can find a quick example in http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=4161616&sid=3bffda21847839a597dc19cfe3c82bb4#p4161616.