For a couple of different reasons I absolutely need an email address validation/confirmation system as described on the first post.
I'm going to begin coding it today, and hope to finish it soon. If anyone already coded something similar and would like to share it please let us know, replying to this post.
I will upload the "email val/conf" patch for v1.6 RC4 as soon as I finish it.
For those interested on my primary reasons, here they are:
1) I'm running a MMORPG/MMORST. The age / computer experience of my visitors is not high at all.
This means that a lot of users will not watch the "spam" inbox for the ticket code or they simply don't have the patience to wait for the message at all, therefore they keep recreating the same ticket with different addresses, or even with the same one.
2) My Email servers are under the supervision of a "greylisting" system. It's a simple let-any-email-pass-only-the-second-time system which cut off the 89.9% of the spam I receive.
Now, there is another antispam system used by a few hosts, which is in contrast with mine: the is-sender-email-routable system.
When the ticket code is sent to one of those serves, they try my "mail from" address for SMTP availability, and my server answer is "try again later", as the greylisting system requires. Now, really bad configured mail servers (as hotmail.it, for the record) take that as a "NO, this address doesn't exists", therefore blocking my Email.
For the reasons explained on point 1), that ticket will be recreated until a good mail server is targeted, maybe hours or days later.
Now, validating the email address won't solve neither one or the other problem, but it will definitely avoid tons of duplicated tickets to manage from my staff, since the ticket will be visible only when the email is read by the user (I plan to create a new separated group of tickets like "open" and "closed", named "not validated", which get erased after some time).
I'm sure I'm not the only one with one or both of these problems... and that's why I'd like to see my code (or a better one, of course) in the next release of osTicket. Wouldn't it be nice? :)