Looks like a bunch is supported out of Herald already:

@devd, do you have the ability to create a global rule/would this work for your purpose?
I don't have the ability to create a global rule on this install, so if it were up to me to make this flow, herald doesn't work as a solution.

(and personal rules don't have enough flexibility to do what you need)

ohh cool! yeah .. let me try this out. thanks @chad

this works. The only problem is that every response will create a new task. I can hack around it, I think, but was wondering if there was a way to tell Phabricator to not create a task in those cases.

In T9582#140572, @devd wrote:

this works. The only problem is that every response will create a new task. I can hack around it, I think, but was wondering if there was a way to tell Phabricator to not create a task in those cases.

I don't really understand the problem. You want people to file bugs but tasks to not really be created in some cases? This sounds more like Nuance (our help desk tool).

Sorry, that was badly phrased. My apologies.

The high level hope was that I could just add the incoming email id to a mailing list we have for people to ask questions. This way evry new thread could get its own task. Only problem is that any reply to an existing thread (which got its own task already) will create a whole new task..

Maybe Nuance is the right thing for this?

Would this work?

• Create a "Mailing List" user for mailing list (orange-help@company.com).
• Have users email a different inbound address (orange-bugs@company.com).
• Have Herald add the Mailing List user as a subscriber as part of your inbound processing.

So the user would send "Need help getting the Orange Product working" to orange-bugs@company.com. Phabricator would create a task, then send T9232: Need help getting the Orange Product working to the mailing list and the user. Replies by anyone would go to the task.

Nuance will refine this sort of workflow, too, but I think the approach above would work today. If you make the mailing list thread the primary coordinating object Phabricator won't really be able to reconcile that discussion into a single task thread, but if you make the task thread the primary object it should have better luck. Then activity directly on the task will also be sent to everyone, whereas if the task creation address is just subscribed to a mailing list updates from the web interface would not be sent out to the same users by default.

good point. Unfortunately, the mailing list is already set up and migrating that might be more effort than needed (there are all the existing links; subscribers; guidelines etc).

The option I was thinking of was to just add a filter in my inbox that says "emails to this list that don't start with a RE:" should forward to the phabricator alias. I think I am gonna try that as a lower cost solution.