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Why do I get occasional blank threads when the customer updates the incident by email?

Environment:

All versions.  Techmail, email

Resolution:

1. To verify the cause of a blank thread you have to review the original email as it arrives.  Enable the EGW_SAVE_ORIG_MESSAGE configuration to save a copy of emails that create incidents.  Refer to Answer ID 2762: Maintaining copies of incoming email for incident creation for more information. Note that an email that updates an incident may not be saved.

2. Inspect the email message in a text editor that allows Linux end of lines such as NotePad++ or TextPad.  Note that Microsoft Notepad will not view the email correctly.

The body is the section after the header and will be separated by blank lines somewhere after text like
"Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=abcdefghijklmnop".

Inspect the message to verify the format follows the following requirements: 

• All sections contained in the root (such as text, html or multipart mixed) must contain a full equivalent copy of the message.  Note that there will be differences in the messages as html text also contains tags for formatting and multipart sections may contain multiple nested sections.
  
• All message parts must be separated by the boundaries in the current message.  If there are multiple messages contained in the email (such as a forward or a reply) there may be multiple boundary separators. All boundary separators from previous messages should be nested inside the boundary separators of the current message.

3. Add the missing part of the email to a customer entry and work with the sender of the message to eliminate the cause of the format issue.

Example message:

From:  Some Sender <customer@gmail.com>
To: Some Receiver <support@mbox.custhelp.com>
Subject: Formatted text mail
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=abcdefghijklmnop

preamble - Text here is ignored.

--abcdefghijklmnop
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

...plain text version of message goes here...

--abcdefghijklmnop
Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"

...html version of same message goes here...

--abcdefghijklmnop

Content-Type: image/jpeg;
 name="fishtacos.jpg"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
 filename="fishtacos.jpg"

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAgAAZABkAAD/7AARRHVja3kAAQAEAAAAPAAA/+4ADkFkb2JlAGTAAAAA
Af/bAIQABgQEBAUEBgUFBgkGBQYJCwgGBggLDAoKCwoKDBAMDAwMDAwQDA4PEA8ODBMTFBQT
AeLAAPFgAHiwADxYAB4sAA8WAAeLAAPFgAWn9mAB3wd0AH//2Q==
--abcdefghijklmnop