Send an email to an issue
Problem To Solve
When interacting with an email, I want to forward that email to a GitLab issue, so that I can attach the email to the issue via a comment.
Proposal to be implemented
Through additional discussion, we've landed on the following proposed implementation.
- On every issue, expose a button to copy an email address for an Issue.
- The email address that is generated will not be generic, but tied to the logged in user via their
incoming_email_token. This lines up with how we allow a logged in user to create issues by email. - When an email is sent to that address, create a comment made by the user identified by the
incoming_email_token.
Final UX
The new "Issue email" section will live below the "Reference" area. The address should be truncated in a similar fashion length and style-wise to Reference, with the icon to Copy. The address itself should be markable so the user can select it, ideally with one click, in the event the Copy button fails. Only the email should be selected/copied.
| Placement, Default State | Selected State |
|---|---|
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Permissions
- The "Copy Issue Email" button is only visible to Guest users or above to prevent potential abuse and spam
- You must be a member of the Project to see and copy the email address.
Constraints
- GraphQL
- Pajamas
Tier
Original Description
The issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3243 (New Issue by email) was about adding the ability to answer by mail and open new issues by mail. One of our customer support members however wants to be able to forward an email to an issue after filing the issue.
Is there any hidden trick to do this?
Workflow:
- Customer contacts support
- support tries to reproduce bug
- support files issue in gitlab if it is really a bug
- sometimes support needs to attach the email to the issue in gitlab
Design and requirements
- See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/35264#note_102270136.
- Given an existing email conversation, when you select "forward/reply" or whatever in your email client, the email client is really just automatically generating a new email in compose mode, possibly with a bunch of attachments.
- You paste in an additional recipient for that new email, namely a special email address that is associated with an existing issue.
- That entire email's contents are "sent to the issue", and appear as a new comment in the issue, with all the attachments attached to that comment.
- That comment could potentially be very long since it potentially could be the result of a very long email thread with many weird formatting artifacts due to email clients doing their own custom formatting.
- We need some design to access the special email address associated with an issue. One concept is putting that email address in the sidebar. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/35264#note_44533645
Release notes
To more efficiently integrate GitLab into your email workflows, each issue now has a personalized email address that can be used to send an email to an issue, which will create a new comment on your behalf. You can now safely say goodbye to manually copying email content and attachments into your GitLab issues.