I am in search for the perfect non-intrusive personal email ticket tracker system. Many people send me email which require me to do some things before I can either answer them or provide them with a definite solution. Right now, I put those emails in a “avoir” (“to see” in French) folder which grows continously as I easily forget to remove things from them when it’s done. Also, it is now so big that I have trouble navigating through it.

I am in the need of a real ticket tracking system which would allow me to prioritize such requests, set deadlines and so on. This system would need to be non-intrusive as I do not want people to have to do anything but reply to emails from me; in particular, I don’t want to change the subject line nor ask them to use another email address. It would also have to work if several people are in copy.

I already keep archives of all my incoming and outgoing emails. The idea would be for me to bounce an email which requires further processing to a known-only-by-me address which would open a new ticket. Any email following this one in the same thread, even if it has arrived on my system already, would need to be added to the newly created ticket. Using the In-Reply-To and References field should be enough to get anything related to the starting email (which may not be the first one in a thread).

In order to achieve that, I would need to record, each time an email arrives, its Message-Id as well as its parent Message-Id. Each time a mail arrives, if it is a direct or indirect successor of a mail that has been used to open a ticket, it would be added automatically to the corresponding issue. A web interface would allow me to prioritize and operate on tickets (e.g., close them).

Is anyone aware of such a beast? (in the Free Software world of course)

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