Service Desk SEG March Mid-Month Update

Video-Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOg9laFjqPk

Table of contents

1. Native attachments for Service Desk email
2. Results from customer interviews
3. Progress on verification for Service Desk custom email

Native attachments for Service Desk email

Native attachments for Service Desk emails allow external participants like the issue author to receive uploads to a comment as a native email attachment. This is great because previously based on your project settings or instance configuration external participants could not access media assets via the provided links in certain scenarios.

If comments have uploads larger than 10MBs we fall back to sending links.

• Successfully rolled out globally on gitlab.com [Feature flag] Rollout of `service_desk_new_not... (gitlab-org/gitlab#386860 - closed)
• Now defaults to on, preparation for 15.10 release Native attachments for Service Desk emails (gitlab-org/gitlab!114550 - merged)
• Documentation changes reflecting the change merged Change Service Desk native attachments docs for... (gitlab-org/gitlab!114296 - merged)
• Secondary release post item prepared and merged Native attachments for Service Desk emails (gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!121161 - merged)

Results from customer interviews

• Lot of input from customers, e.g. email forwarding in Microsoft Exchange O365 does not forward in a standard conform way and does not preserve original From and/or (depending on the setup) To header information. It only preserves the original From for external forwarding via Exchange Mail flow transport rules. These are limited to 300, so this is not a sustainable option.
• So I decided to revise plan and accelerate email ingestion. So I'm preparing the current architecture right now for IMAP and MS graph API ingestion.
• Moving general email ingestion (incoming_email and service_desk_email) to Sidekiq worker jobs will follow and can use the new architecture. Meta: Replace mail_room email ingestion with sc... (gitlab-org/gitlab#393157)
• Multiple issue email participants is highly requested. Especially that we include CC and BCC emails right away on issue creation. Also the option to remove and add additional external participants. Additionally we need to distinguish between messages from different external participants. Right now all incoming emails from external parties have the GitLab Support-Bot user as the author. gitlab-org/gitlab#226995 (comment 1315621112)+

Progress on verification for Service Desk custom email

• Model changes for verification merged Adds Service Desk custom email verification mod... (gitlab-org/gitlab!112938 - merged)
• Preparation for credentials refactoring. Move custom email credentials from service_desk_settings to dedicated table service_desk_custom_email_credentials where all credentials will live (SMTP, IMAP and OAuth) Moves Service Desk custom email credentials to ... (gitlab-org/gitlab!114917 - merged)