ticgithub: A GitHub-based email ticketing system

Our team at OpenFE has reached a slightly uncomfortable point in terms of support requests: we’re not big enough to dedicate someone to managing incoming support requests, but we’re getting enough support requests that we need some sort of system to track them.

The obvious solution here is to go to one of the commercial solutions for this purpose. However, most of those solutions seemed relatively expensive for our needs. We did have a meeting with one service that seemed affordable, but it was highly tied to a workflow using Google Chrome as the browser and Gmail as your primary email tool. Although our support email address uses Gmail, not all of our team does, nor does everyone use Chrome.

I realized that, for about the same cost (in my work hours) as a couple years of that tool, I could probably write something that would work for our needs, and would be better integrated into our existing workflows. In particular, I could create something that would enable us to use notification and assignment mechanisms that were a part of GitHub to handle email tickets, which are the same tools we already use to organize our software development process.

The resulting project is called ticgithub (hoping that I don’t get sued! The idea is that you will create a (possibly private) GitHub repository where issues will track your email tickets. It provides highly customizable workflows to manage the following tasks for you:

• When an email arrives at the team Gmail account, it creates a GitHub issue to track that email.
• When an issue on GitHub is assigned to a particular teammate, a custom label will be applied in the Gmail inbox to indicate that the task has been assigned to someone.
• If an issue sits without assignment for a set time, a bot will prod everyone as a reminder to assign the issue (via a comment on the GitHub issue tracking the ticket)
• If an issue has been assigned but not closed for a set time, a bot can prod the assignee (or others) to reply to the unanswered ticket.

For a team that operates with a response time on the order of a day, with support responsibilities as part of the developer duties, this tool allows you to integrate email ticket support into a GitHub-focused workflow. I think it will work for us; I hope others will try it too! For more details, see the main ticgithub repository website, especially its README file.