Many network operators have Trouble Ticket systems (as per RFC1297)
which send mails notifying customers, peers and other interested parties
of network problems, events and so on. Many of these mails cross my
desk, so I thought it might be useful to make two small suggestions to
trivially increase the functionality of these mails ... use the mail
headers cleverly.
Firstly, a lot of us receive a lot of tickets and to ease the workload
we filter them into seperate mailboxes. To assist this process, rather
than making us all use unreliable filters based on a sender address or a
particular format to the subject, consider including a custom X-header,
here at HEAnet we use:
X-HEAnet-TicketID: [ticket id]
X-HEAnet-Ticket-Distribution: [public|noc|personal ..]
But only one is really neccessary (though I guess it depends on how easy
you want to make subfiltering), and it should be committed to. No
matter what you do to your trouble ticketing system the X header should
remain. This would avoid the situation of breaking filtering on people
when you change whatever unique subtlety they happen to be relying upon.
Now secondly, after you've made it easy for people to distuingish your
tickets from those of others, consider making it easy for people to
distinguish your tickets from each other.
For 1 year now, HEAnet have been issueing tickets with Message-ID's
generated by our ticketing system, for example: