Service Desk: Attribute comment authorship for external user
Release notes
When a requester replies to a service desk email, it is useful to the service desk agent to know who made the comment. But because the requester can be an external user with no GitLab account or access to the GitLab project, these comments were previously attributed to the GitLab Support Bot. With this release, email replies from requesters will be attributed to the external users; thus making it more clear who made the comments in the GitLab issue.
Problem to solve
When an external user replies to an email on a service desk issue, the author is listed as GitLab Support Bot. It is helpful for the agent to know exactly who is writing these comments.
Adding several external parties to an issue is still behind a feature flag, so not publicly available ATM. But once enabled customers won't be able to tell which external participant wrote the answer.
Further details
This issue is a bit like #226991 (closed) but for comments. The issue attribution and comment attributions have different mechanisms.
Proposal
Before
After
We can grab the email address from the issue_email_participants
table, but we need a way to connect one of the participants from issue_email_participants
with a comment their wrote (see more details), as it's planned to have several external parties to an issue (now behind a feature flag).