Resolved 8.3 Ticket Import Failed on owner tickets

[harry1]

Your fixing something that wasn't broken. Put it back how it was.

[bear]

30 minutes ago, WHMCS John said:

We're interested to hear your feedback on how effectively this would address the situation at hand, and whether any potential extra noise in the ticket system is a worthy compromise?

Having something pop up to say it's blocked would work, as long as it could be relied on and you can allow the message right from there. The current method of digging deep into the logs on the suspicion of a missing reply isn't workable. 

[jmartin_mds]

Maybe, just maybe, you could listen your customers and put it back the way it was, the way it's always been, the way that we rely upon to effectively run our businesses. WHMCS isn't for lawyers or accountants or other industries that can lollygag when it comes to replies. We're in hosting and when things go wrong sometimes it needs attention immediately, and there is absolutely no way for us to know every person that every customer will ever involve. It's not realistic and it is affecting our business to the point where other options are getting to be worth the money. This is a once in a decade decision, so anyone who leaves isn't coming back. So maybe you should give us back the software that we're paying for instead of tacking on six more things that will break and telling us it's a feature when you KNOW its a bug. YOU KNOW ITS A BUG. The way I know you know? I have the confirmed bug reports! YOUR OWN TEAM CONFIRMED THIS IS A BUG! So stop blowing smoke up my a** and just fix the software like you've been saying you were going to and in fact did fix for a while before you broke it again!

[WHMCS John]

CORE-16311 is the case for this work. A case assignment by itself doesn't imply a behaviour is classed as a defect or regression. Apologies if my team didn't make this nuance clear.

The change in v8.0 was made intentionally to address a specific problem which has existed as long as email piping itself; one of ticket system collisions. We won't be reverting back to the previous behaviour, but will iterate to a solution which can meet both needs.

Everyone's valuable feedback identifies that it isn't practical to rely solely on code to determine whether an email from an unknown person should be associated with a ticket using the available data in the email headers (address, subject, etc). Therefore a human will need to be involved in the decision making process.

 

This proposal should provide the best of both worlds; you will be notified when a reply is made to the ticket (as before) and can decide whether or not to import a blocked message into the ticket.

In this way you can protect tickets from messages which shouldn't be there, and import the messages which should.

You can always pre-authorize the sender by staff or the client adding the sender as a contact or the ticket CC Recipients list.

 

Your feedback in helping us move forward is welcomed.

 

[jmartin_mds]

Ticket collisions? That's seriously the issue you're trying to "fix" by introducing a whole lot of new work on everyone's part? In five years I can count on one finger the number of times that's come up and it was an extremely unusual situation wherein a ticket from another vendor was forwarded to us and it happened to match an older ticket in our system, but even in that case the collision would still have happened in your new "feature" because they were both clients and the ticket import wouldn't have been blocked.

If this is how WHMCS is planning to respond to customers now by ignoring our needs that's good information to have for me to plan out the future of my business.

[bear]

22 minutes ago, WHMCS John said:

one of ticket system collisions

Why is it only now that reason/excuse is being mentioned? Before it was the "enhanced user/client system everyone was asking for", even though I can't recall seeing anyone doing that.

[WHMCS John]

4 minutes ago, bear said:

Why is it only now that reason/excuse is being mentioned? Before it was the "enhanced user/client system everyone was asking for", even though I can't recall seeing anyone doing that.

It is both. The user system was the larger and much higher demaned feature, so made sense to talk about that first.

 

22 minutes ago, jmartin_mds said:

In five years I can count on one finger the number of times that's come up and it was an extremely unusual situation wherein a ticket from another vendor was forwarded to us and it happened to match an older ticket in our system

I'm glad to hear this hasn't impacted you often or caused great concern when it did. Of course users are unlikely to discuss this situation in a public forum, but I can confirm that in the private fora of support tickets, causes significant concern to a suitable number of WHMCS users to warrant a product change to address it.

[jmartin_mds]

If this is the best you can come up with that's really sad.

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

4 minutes ago, WHMCS John said:

but I can confirm that in the private fora of support tickets, causes significant concern to a suitable number of WHMCS users to warrant a product change to address it.

Brill, so all the other issues where things don't work/are ridiculous or counter intuitive that get discussed privately and in here should take priority then 🤣

Let's discuss gdpr first 😁

 

[123host]

8 hours ago, J-B said:

Why are you making life so difficult for us? Do it as it was!

We want all mails. We don't even use a spam filter so that we really don't lose any email.

Email is our Business! Or please offer a option to disable this feature (or bug) and allow all emails.

Sorry, while the problem is a serious one, I don't agree with this.  I don't want the rubbish emails and the hook solution (above) created an effective stop-gap where I can see a list of blocked emails and handle them.

 

@WHMCS John Your proposal seems to be a solution that obviously won't keep everyone happy but looks like it will work.  Perhaps having the ability to disable it as J-B suggested should be included since you are implementing this from scratch.

[jmartin_mds]

@WHMCS John Thanks for leaving this bug unresolved. We've got clients pissed off at us. When we start losing business because WHMCS isn't functioning correctly should I just request a credit from you off our bill or should I loop my legal team in too?

[Bigol'tastynuggets]

48 minutes ago, jmartin_mds said:

@WHMCS John Thanks for leaving this bug unresolved. We've got clients pissed off at us. When we start losing business because WHMCS isn't functioning correctly should I just request a credit from you off our bill or should I loop my legal team in too?

In three days, I think you'll get a hearty non-answer full of platitudes 😛

 

But yes, these suspiciously silent in public yet uber vocal in private customers seem to make some awful decisions for us all! A more inquisitive person may deduce that these "customers" are a way to blame bad decisions and avoid reverting even when it causes huge problems.... but alas.... I wouldn't make such links.... I firmly believe they are as real as that girl little Johnny met on the school trip! 

[123host]

Reminder that there is a workaround hook to save us from what WHMCS broke

The code is available at https://github.com/xxxmicrobexxx/whmcsEmailImportHook

[123host]

@WHMCS John - so this issue continues to be painful for people and I have found another example of how broken it is.

Ticket reply sent to account owner.  They have an auto responder that sends from a different email address.  Ticket Import Failed, the only reason I know is because of the workaround hook developed by users to fix a problem you created.

WHMCS, which boasts will "automate your business", requires us to manually discover that this is happening and then manually add some sort of exception every time it happens.

It is still a puzzle why are you adding an additional layer of complexity to WHMCS? 

You know what stat I would love to know?  How many WHMCS users aren't even aware of this bug and are completely missing support tickets. 

[bear]

4 hours ago, 123host said:

Reminder that there is a workaround hook to save us from what WHMCS broke

The code is available at https://github.com/xxxmicrobexxx/whmcsEmailImportHook

Why does it say to put the file into modules/hooks? That doesn't seem right (doesn't exist, for one). 

[123host]

14 minutes ago, bear said:

Why does it say to put the file into modules/hooks? That doesn't seem right (doesn't exist, for one). 

ahhh, crap.  should be includes/hooks.  Fixed - thanks

[jmartin_mds]

Thank you so much @123host! This is great! I added a couple little changes to limit it to just Failed Imports and to set a timeframe:

foreach (Capsule::table('tblticketmaillog')->where('status', 'not like', '%Successfully%')->where('status', 'not like', '%Blocked sender%')->where('status', 'not like', '%Prevented an Auto Responder%')->where('email', 'not like', 'mailer-daemon%')->orderBy('id', 'desc')->limit(10)->get() as $msg){

		
		/* Name */
		if ($msg->name === $msg->email) $name = $msg->name;
		else $name = "{$msg->name} <{$msg->email}>";
		
		/* Date */
		$today = new DateTime();
		$msg_date = new DateTime($msg->date);
		$interval = $today->diff($msg_date);
		$date_interval = abs($interval->format('%R%a'));
		
		if ($date_interval <= 14){
		
		if ($date_interval == 0 && $interval->h < date('H')) {
		    $date_interval = 'Today';
		}
		else if ($date_interval == 0 && $interval->h >= date('H')){
		    $date_interval = 'Yesterday';
		}
		else if ($date_interval == 1) $date_interval = 'Yesterday';
		else $date_interval .= ' days ago';

		$output .= "
		<tr>
			<td>$date_interval</td><td>$name</td><td><a href='#' onclick=\"window.open('/" . $GLOBALS['customadminpath'] . "/systemmailimportlog.php?display=true&id={$msg->id}','','width=650,height=400,scrollbars=yes');return false\">{$msg->subject}</a></td><td>{$msg->status}</td></tr>";
		}
		
	}

 

[WHMCS John]

Hi all,

Barring any unforeseen blockers, we're aiming to include the changes I described earlier in the forthcoming v8.3 Release Candidate for pre-release testing.

I'll be sure to update this thread once released!

 

[123host]

16 hours ago, jmartin_mds said:

Thank you so much @123host! This is great! I added a couple little changes to limit it to just Failed Imports and to set a timeframe:

That is why it is on github, it isn't perfect for everyone and, unlike WHMCS code, it is open for you to tweak as needed.

@WHMCS John - please, make the hook obsolete.

[bear]

I've had a few ticket responses fail (I use piping import), and have yet to see that in this hook. Always shows empty. 
I have ticket responses going to a 2nd mailbox just so I know they've failed, and the most recent few show only "Ticket Import Failed" in the main log. No reasons given, just that brief message. I opened a thread asking if there was any more info to be found anywhere, but it got no responses. 

Disappointing. 

[WHMCS John]

Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce the release of v8.3 Release Candidate 1, which incorporates these changes: https://blog.whmcs.com/133702/whmcs-83-release-candidate-now-available

Blocked tickets will now return tickets to Customer Reply status with an interface to import blocked messages from unauthorised senders.

 

Additionally  a new setting Allow Insecure Imports effectively restores the v7 behaviour.

Enable this option in Configuration > System Settings > General Settings > Support tab.

 

Relevant documentation: https://docs.whmcs.com/Blocked_Support_Email_Replies

 

Please do take part in the v8.3 pre-release testing of this features and others, sharing your feedback with us:

• https://whmcs.community/forum/556-whmcs-83-beta-discussion-board/
• https://beta.whmcs.com/

This is your opportunity to share feedback on new features whilst they are at their most malleable.