Usage Difficulty - a tester addicted to email

We're having a slight difficulty with a tester who is addicted to email.

Use Scenario:

From within FogBugz, I assign a case to Tester Bob.  FogBugz sends out an email notifying Tester Bob of the case assignment, and displaying the associated text of the case.  Tester Bob knows what I'm talking about and hits reply *from within his favorite email application*.  He drafts out a long response with a question for me and hits send.  FogBugz correctly appends the response to the case.

Problem:
The case is assigned to Tester Bob, so in essence he is replying to himself!  The only way this gets caught is when the quality control supervisor happens to review the case and sees it's still assigned to Tester Bob when in fact it should be assigned to me.

Suggestions? (that don't involve trying to force Tester Bob to use FogBugz to assign cases back to me from *within* FogBugz)?

Thanks--

Assad E.K. Ebrahim
Wednesday, December 01, 2004

You should have the email address on the Site page be a non functioning address.  It suggests so in the instructions to prevent exactly the scenario you are talking about.  Then when Tester Bob replies, it will bounce back to him.  He will learn to click on the link and put his comments in FogBugz and not in the notification email.

Michael H. Pryor
Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Well having the email set to a non-functioning address strikes me as something not working as intended.  Or at least unintended consequences.  Why have the ability to set an address if it recommends it be nonfunctioning?

David Whatley
Thursday, December 02, 2004

In order to send the email you need a valid FROM address, or at least something that appears to look like a valid address, and some SMTP servers can be set up to not relay mail unless they are from the domain in question (which is why it isn't auto-notification@fogbugz.example.com).  It's like any other alert where an automatic process generates an email, but replying to it doesn't make sense (like when a server emails the sysadmin that its hard drive is full).

Michael H. Pryor
Fog Creek Software
Thursday, December 02, 2004

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