Auto-reply support requests sent to Help Desk
intrigeri & sajolida had meetings with Help Desk, initially as part of our budget forecasting process, that switched to (re)defining the mission of our Help Desk and figuring out ways to lower the pressure on its members.
We decided that we want support requests sent to Help Desk to get an automatic email answer:
- “thanks, we don’t have the capacity to answer every request”
- link to the doc
- set expectations wrt. timing (lower expectations)
Help Desk would still read the reports and extract the info we need for the “Gather qualitative and quantitative user data” part of its mission, even if they don’t always answer.
Once this auto-reply is in place, a number of other, important changes can be implemented in Help Desk’s workflow and processes.
To get this done, we need to:
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Develop & improve a set of standard replies: #18070 (closed) -
Figure out which email gets an auto-reply: is it OK to do so for every email received by the tails-bugs list? -
Figure out what implementation would satisfy the requirements -
@groente makes the auto-reply mechanism ignore WhisperBack reports - Actually, ignore all messages sent to tails-bugs@. In terms on implementation, this translates to: auto-reply only messages sent explicitly "To: tails-support-private@".
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@cbrownstein finalizes the contents of the initial auto-reply message: - Avoid double-quotes and weird characters if possible.
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Cody improves https://tails.boum.org/support/help_desk_standard_replies/#standard-reply → !746 (merged) -
Cody provides the Subject header to groente → Thank you for reporting your problem to Tails
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Document how to change the auto-reply message → !780 (merged) - The canonical version can remain in tails/tails where it currently is. So anyone, including Help Desk, Technical writers, developers, can propose changes to the text, just like any other piece of doc.
- Once ready, we have to ask sysadmins to deploy it to production.
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Deploy in production - No coordination needed, assuming the setup has been tested on the test mailing list already.
Ideally, the auto-reply message would be stored in a place that Help Desk members could easily propose changes for. This would allow them, for example, to maintain in that message the list of current Top 10 issues reported by users.
Blueprint
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/blueprints/-/wikis/Helpdesk_Auto-reply/