In the last Tips and Tricks article, we looked at creating response templates and connecting them to specific queues. Today we're going to look at how salutations, signatures, and attachments relate to responses in OTRS. 

When you reply to a customer through the OTRS agent interface, the system uses a combination of elements to generate the reply. These include:

• A predefined salutation at the top (i.e. Dear Customer...)
• A predefined response body in the middle (this can be blank)
• A predefined signature at the end of the message
• An optional predefined attachment 

The following image shows the reply that gets generated when the agent selects the predefined response "Email Trouble" in our system. The agent can edit any part of this message on the fly before sending.: 

Salutations & Signatures

Salutations and signatures are linked to queues in OTRS. This allows a unique greeting and signature for each queue (e.g. your service desk queue and your level 2 support queue are probably going to require different signatures.). If the initial email from the customer included first and last name information, this can be inserted into the salutation using notification tags. The system can also insert the name of the agent who is creating the reply into the signature. 

Responses & Attachements

As we saw in the last article, when you define a response and connect it to a queue, it becomes available as a reply option on "external" type articles in a ticket. Predefined attachments in OTRS are linked to responses. 

Now that we can see how these elements are related, let's configure our salutations, signatures, and attachments.  

Directions

Salutations  

Navigate to the Admin /  Salutations dialog:

Click "Add salutation":

This will take you to the new salutation screen, where you define the name and content of your salutation. You will probably want to use the notification tag <OTRS_CUSTOMER_REALNAME> - this will use the customer name from the email X-Headers, and if no name is available, it will insert the email address of the customer. The best practice for salutations is to keep it short and simple. Use your response templates for including further information about the ticket to the customer: 

Navigate to Admin / Queues and edit each queue that you want to connect your new salutation to. Note: You can also edit the system standard salutation, which will allow you to bypass the this step, as the system standard is selected in each queue by default:

Signatures

Navigate to the Admin / Signatures dialog:

Click "Add signature":

This will take you to the new signature screen, where you define the name and content of the signature. Remember that signatures are linked to queues, not individual agents. Take advantage of the notification tags <OTRS_Agent_UserFirstname> and <OTRS_Agent_UserLastname> to insert the appropriate agent name into each reply:

Navigate to Admin / Queues and edit each queue that you want to connect your new signature to. Note: You can also edit the system standard signature, which will allow you to bypass the this step, as the system standard is selected in each queue by default:

Attachments

Navigate to the Admin / Attachments dialog:

Click "Add attachment":

This will take you to the new attachment screen, where you define the name and upload the attachment. Each attachment can only contain one file. (Max attachment size is 16 MB by default - this can be configured via the WebMaxFileUpload setting in Config Options: Framework -> Core::Web, however it is not advisable to send files bigger than 16 MB as most email servers will reject them): 

Once you save the attachment, you need to connect it with a response. Navigate to Admin / Attachments <-> Responses:

Select the new attachment you created:

Select the responses that you want the attachment automatically connected to:

Now when you select the appropriate response template in the agent frontend, the attachment will automatically be included.