Reopen on Reply

When a customer replies to an email about a ticket that has already been closed, Scitor reopens it automatically and posts the reply as a new comment. No ticket is silently lost just because a customer’s follow-up arrived after you marked it resolved.

How it works

For every inbound email that is not sent to a per-ticket reply address (<hashid>+<nodeId>@…), Scitor looks up the most recent ticket from the same sender with a matching subject (after stripping Re: / Fwd: and friends — see Deduplication). If a match is found:

• Ticket is open → the email is appended as a comment on the existing ticket.
• Ticket is closed → Scitor reopens the issue/discussion via the GitHub API, applies a reopened label, and posts the reply as a comment.
• No match → a brand-new ticket is created as usual.

The reopen step uses the same Octokit installation token already used for inbound processing — no extra setup is required.

Configuration

Reopen-on-reply is part of the inbound configuration block in scitor.yaml and is on by default.

inbound:
  reopen_on_reply: true

Set reopen_on_reply: false to keep closed tickets closed. In that case, replies to closed tickets create a new ticket (subject to the deduplication window).

Notes

• Plus-addressed replies (hashid+nodeId@…) always go to the original ticket regardless of state — that path is handled by the existing reply pipeline.
• Blocked senders are still blocked: the reply is dropped before any reopen is attempted.
• Rate-limited senders are still rate-limited: see Rate Limiting.
• The reopened label is created on first use, alongside the existing Scitor labels.