This month's annoyance: people non-consensually assigning me tickets in their organisation's ticket tracker.

As #PuTTY maintainer, I'm often asked to fill in annoying government paperwork, usually from someone else's country. "All the software our organisation uses must comply with the National Foo Directive, so please fill in this huge questionnaire to confirm that you do."

Often without bothering to even mention which nation's National Foo Directive it is. Often without noticing that a lot of the questions are obviously meaningless (e.g. assuming the product is hardware, or a cloud service, or something). And _always_ without thinking through the difference between a commercial software vendor (who has a financial incentive to do this kind of paperwork, and can employ staff to do it out of the revenue stream from selling the software itself) and an unpaid free software maintainer (LOL no).

In the past, this has generally involved an email from some actual employee tasked with going through the Big Spreadsheet of all the software that (they know) they're using. So you can reply to the person and explain their misunderstanding. (Generally I wait until the followup email before bothering, in case they manage to engage their own brain before then, which sometimes they do.)

But a new and unwelcome development is that they're starting to do it by automated ticketing systems, so I get an email saying "[employee] has assigned you a task" and I have no doubt it's going to carry on automatically pestering without any way of making it listen to reason. Probably I have no choice but to start blocking these ticketing systems' email addresses.

@simontatham Send in an invoice for each email you receive?

Most will be ignored, sure, but some might stop the emails and, you never know, the occasional one might get paid.

@TimWardCam @simontatham But in that case Simon would be committing himself to doing that work, which (having occasionally caught sight myself of corporate compliance statements) I am fairly sure he doesn't want to do, even for cold hard cash.

Not to mention all the potential tax implications and other legal paperwork of having an apparent revenue stream from random companies in assorted countries around the world.

@losttourist @simontatham Oh, I meant the invoice to be for receiving the email, not for reading it or acting on it.

I mean it ought not to even be _possible_ to assign someone a task in your organisational ticket tracker if they're not in your organisation. The ticketing system should _make_ it impossible, to prevent doing it by accident, and also this kind of (semi?)deliberate abuse.

Why is it even possible to assign me a ticket if I don't have an _account_ on your tracker? The idea that you can assign tickets to any old email address is just ridiculous.

Being able to have an arbitrary email address on the ticket's CC list makes sense, at least sometimes. Some ticket trackers are public-facing, for external people to make support requests. You need to be able to keep the external requester up to date on progress. Fair enough. But _assigning work_ to an external person is not the same thing!

@simontatham

There are instances where you want to be able to assign tasks to a short-term contractor or a person at a partner company, so I can kind-of see why this is possible (though I'm not sure I can see a use case that wouldn't involve either federated SSO or creating an account), but making it easy is just a recipe for leaking your internal issue-tracker state to other people as a result of typos.

Do you know what the issue tracker software they're using is? I'd like to make sure that we avoid it.

@TimWardCam @losttourist @simontatham

The case law that springs to mind is the person who wrote to the TV Licensing Authority with a tracked and recorded letter saying that he charged a £20 processing fee for each letter that he received from them. He was able to enforce this for all letters sent to him after that.

Perhaps a notice in the PuTTY license text saying that there is a processing fee of $100 messages received from an issue tracker would achieve the same thing?

@david_chisnall @losttourist @simontatham I used to have a charge of £100 for receiving each spam email on my web site.

Every now and then I'd send out a batch of invoices.

Not many got paid, but enough did to pay for the stamps several times over.

@simontatham Just start sending them an automatic invoice for several thousands to be paid in full before any work is done. If they pay -- great, if they don't -- not your problem.

@simontatham Why shouldn't it be possible? I work in corporate, and we have a lot of externals working on internal stuff all the time.

@vl but by prior agreement, no? You don't cold-email someone completely at random on the Internet and assign them work to do. You're not their boss or their customer, you have no right to give them work.

The external people working with you are people you have an existing relationship with. So they can have accounts set up in the tracker – not _employee_ accounts, maybe, some other kind of account with limited privileges – but some kind of an account.

If nothing else, don't they have to log in to the tracker as soon as they need to change the state of these tickets you've assigned them?

@simontatham Prior agreement of course :) I was referencing the ability to assign tickets to arbitrary e-mail addresses.

What I find strange here is that they think some random person will do legwork for free for them...

@vl @simontatham My company's Jira can only assign tasks to people it has accounts for. It cannot send emails to anyone else as that was deemed a security hole. All external contractors are provided with access as needed to complete their contracted work.

@simontatham not only would I block them, I'd have a little script to do so automatically. Then let you do a weekly review the list of who-got-blocked-this-week in case there were any false positives.

@simontatham There *must* be some humorous way to include them on the PuTTY home page for a month or two...

@simontatham

Do you geht login credentials or is it working with a link? Maybe i could write a script to post random memes in your unwanted ticket to annoy those companies 😇

@simontatham Send them back a standard support contract with a hefty annual fee…

@simontatham The other alternative is to say that they need to pay you before you do anything. Say, a subscription to a, say, 100k/yr service, Adobe style, with a 24 month-equivalent penalty for ending the contract. Claim that it's "industry standard practice", and that it needs to be backdated to when they started sending the annoying emails before you start taking any action on their tickets.

Might as well see if they're dumb enough to pay for an indefinite comfortable life for you...

@infosecdj @simontatham

Ideal World:
Reply with a contract charging them $1000 per email, with the provision that they agree to the contract by sending you emails.

Then automate sending them a $1000 bill for every email they send.

To avoid an email war, summarize and invoice the outstanding amount weekly. (IE: Don't reply to every email.)

@JeffGrigg @infosecdj @simontatham Updating the license to offer a paid support program, which users accept by sending requests to have you do things for them (not questions whether you could do something, but orders and tickets)

@simontatham this is also why I understand the plight of some devs when they say they do have to ensure they’re not inundated, and I guess a lot of people automatically assume they’re entitled to their time just because…interesting to handle this in the FOSS space

@simontatham yeah I just wouldn’t bother with that. Block, and move on with my life.

@rburchell @simontatham i am already giving away the software FOR FREE, so they can either take it or leave it

@simontatham Yeah, my default action at that point would be reporting as spam and calling it a day. Ridiculous situation.

Fully recognize that may come from my own exhaustion of... everything, including ownership of a very common first.last at gmail dot com.

@david_chisnall @TimWardCam @losttourist @simontatham In that specific case you're referring to, I believe the TV Licensing Authority completely ignored him and he won by default, so unfortunately it did not set a precedent.

@simontatham What I'm hearing is PuTTy has an opening for freelance form fillers?!