Emailed issue merged with unrelated tickets

I’d like to use the issue queue as a ticket system for new orders, but there are some conditions that might prevent this. My use case – customers sending print orders via email, not via our website.

I’ve set up alerts to respond back to a customer’s NEW email with ticket# in the subject, and we’ve trained most of them to reply to these email alerts rather than send a new original email for the same order.

We have customers who use the same subject over and over (e.g. “Newsletter” or “Print order”) for NEW orders, not responses to existing orders.

The problem is that “Newsletter” will append itself to any previous issue with the subject “Newsletter”, even if the previous issue is closed, and re-opens the old ticket without sending an alert.

Is there a way for the issue queue to work more like our current ticketing system (OTRS): any email received with a ticket# in the subject will append to that ticket#, and if the issue is closed, it’s opened. Original emails without ticket# create a new ticket/issue.

Also, I have alerts sending out on “New” status, but I don’t know how to send one each time a customer replies to a ticket. This is generally how our print staff knows that they need to review what the customer has written regarding an order.

I’m certainly open to workarounds, other than deleting the old issue, since this is our record of customer email correspondence.

Regards