Send a reply email to a case that was not emailed into FogBugz

All of the following assumes you have a valid FogBugz Mailbox set up and working.

Current Workarounds

This is a workaround useful for starting email conversations from within FogBugz. Let's say a customer calls on the phone and you want to enter this call as a new case, with the ability to send a reply email from FogBugz:

  1. Bring up FogBugz in your browser
  2. Do not log in (log out if already logged in)
  3. Click "Enter a New Case". (If the project you want to submit to is not visible in the list, log in as an admin, click Projects, click on that project, and set "Allow public submissions" to "yes".)
  4. Enter the email address of the caller and any details you want to include. Logged in users will now be able to click Reply on this case to send email to that address.

Rather than logging in and out all day long to use this approach, you can have a "logged in" browser and a "not logged in" browser open at the same time: 

  1. Log in to FogBugz with "Remember me" not checked (since it works across browser windows).
  2. Leave this browser open, it will be your "logged in" browser.
  3. You can open and close separate browser windows all day long, your logged-in status won't be recognized in these separate windows.

Source Code Modification

The field in the database that you want is the Bug.sCustomerEmail field. If that field is empty, you cannot reply, if that field has an email address, you can reply to that address.

Code modifications are outside the scope of technical support, and you essentially proceed at your own risk. That said, if you can add an HTML form input for this field - i.e. collect the email address from the user as one of the New Case fields - then save it (to Bug.sCustomerEmail) along with the other new case fields, you should be able to reply to that case from then on. It would be the same as the Email field on the public submission page from step 4 above, so you really just need to copy it over from that form submission.

More disclaimers: Making changes to your FogBugz source code voids the technical support portion of any maintenance contract you may have.