Email communications - Escalation timers

[gpanou]

Hello,

In our environment we are expected to implement Queue escalations and use email as the main communication method with the customers.
He have correctly set up email fetching to the point were a direct email to the customer along with our postmaster mail account either in cc or to fields will create an article under the designated ticket.

The outcome on the customer portal is an article with the To: and From: fields properly filled with the contacts information.

However, there is no reset on the first response timer (or any escalation timer) unless a communication is initiated through the agent web interface.

OTRS is updated to the latest version and fresh minimal installs have been tested with the same results.

Couldn't figure out any possible workarounds either with postman filters neither with generic agents, I have also tried setting up SLAs and services and assigning tickets to those two with the saem results.

Is there anything I may have missed, or is this functionality not supported?

If it isn't supported, is there a way to do some developement or is this (escalation timers) locked because I read something relevant on OTRS Developer's manual.

We can afford to do some developing but I would rather prefer we don't.

Any form of help is much appreciated, sorry for the long post.

Thank you,
George

[jojo]

OTRS is designed to use the webinterface as Agent, so stopping escalation requires an article sent by an agent...

[gpanou]

I think I get your point, although just to clarify, isn't the image in the attachment an article sent to the customer by an agent?

The first screenshot is from the agent interface and the second one is taken from the customer interface. Both are generated through an email sent to the customer and our mail fetcher account as CC.

Even though I found that I can catch the Article Send event, I haven't found a way to set (or reset or advance) the escalation states, do you know of any method I could intervene?

(even through coding or custom commands execution)

Thank you