Using Procmail to route messages to Request Tracker (RT) queue’s
At work we use Request Tracker (RT) by Best Practical to handle our help desk e-mail and public correspondence e-mail queue’s. When setting up RT you would typically provide different e-mail addresses for each queue and have people e-mail the appropriate address to submit a question or trouble ticket. In some organizations such as ours your support base is already use to a mechanism that was put in place of everyone emailing a single address such as support@yourcompany.com. In my situation it would have been very difficult to change this because of all the outside agencies that also use this support address. Good news is there is an answer to this problem called Procmail.
This guide is based off of CentOS 5.5 with Postfix as the MTA and the latest Procmail available via ‘yum’. The location of the configuration files may be different in your Linux distribution of choice.
First we need to tell Postfix to pass the mail to an external command for further processing Add this command to your /etc/postfix/main.cf configuration file.
[dberube@itsupport ~]$ sudo vi /etc/postfix/main.cf # The mailbox_command parameter specifies the optional external # command to use instead of mailbox delivery. The command is run as # the recipient with proper HOME, SHELL and LOGNAME environment settings. # Exception: delivery for root is done as $default_user. # # Other environment variables of interest: USER (recipient username), # EXTENSION (address extension), DOMAIN (domain part of address), # and LOCAL (the address localpart). # # Unlike other Postfix configuration parameters, the mailbox_command # parameter is not subjected to $parameter substitutions. This is to # make it easier to specify shell syntax (see example below). # # Avoid shell meta characters because they will force Postfix to run # an expensive shell process. Procmail alone is expensive enough. # # IF YOU USE THIS TO DELIVER MAIL SYSTEM-WIDE, YOU MUST SET UP AN # ALIAS THAT FORWARDS MAIL FOR ROOT TO A REAL USER. # mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail
After modifying the Postfix main.cf file we need to create our Procmail ruleset which will be saved in this file /etc/procmailrc.
[dberube@itsupport ~]$ sudo vi /etc/procmailrc # Set Variables SHELL=/bin/sh LOGFILE=/var/log/procmail_log LOG="--- Logging ${LOGFILE} for ${LOGNAME} ---\\n" VERBOSE=yes RT_MAILGATE="/opt/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate" RT_URI="http://itsupport.domain1.local/ticket" LOGABSTRACT=no # Accounts Payable :0 * ^TO_.*rt-ap@ |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE -queue "Accounts Payable" --action correspond --url $RT_URI # Value Adjustment Board :0 * ^TO_.*rt-vab@ * ^TO_.*vab@ |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE -queue "Value Adjustment Board" --action correspond --url $RT_URI # Domain 1 :0 * ^From: .*@domain1.com { :0 * ^Subject:.*benchmark |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE -queue "Benchmark" --action correspond --url $RT_URI :0 |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE -queue "Office Queue" --action correspond --url $RT_URI } # Domain 2 :0 * ^From: .*@domain2.com |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE --queue "Domain 2" --action correspond --url $RT_URI # Domain 3 :0 * ^From: .*@domain3.com |/usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE --queue "Domain 3" --action correspond --url $RT_URI # All Others :0 * !^From: .*@domain1.com|.*@domain2.com|.*@domain3.com |usr/bin/perl $RT_MAILGATE --queue "External Users" --action correspond --url $RT_URI
You will notice that the rule set for Domain 1 looks a little different than the other rules. For messages that are arriving to my RT server from @domain1.com I am checking for the subject line as well. If any message arrives from domain1.com that has the word “benchmark” in the subject line send it to the “Benchmark” queue. If that check does not match the email will be placed in the “Office Queue”. Most of these rules are self-explanatory so I won’t go into the details of every rule, the one other rule that I believe is worth talking about is the last one in the rule set. My “All Others” rule says that is an incoming email message to my support email address does not match domain1, domain2 or domain3 place it in the “External Users” queue.
I hope this helps you find alternative ways to handle e-mail processing with RT. In the future I will be posting more guides on how to configure RT in an Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange Server environment.
How does your /etc/aliases look like?
@Herve
Currently I do not have any entries in my /etc/aliases pertaining to RT. Instead I just created users for rt-ap and rt-vab from the example above. Postfix is setup to process all inbound mail through procmail.
I hope this helps.