Merging Tickets

Merging tickets

Two people report the same broken printer. A monitoring system opens forty tickets for one outage. A customer emails twice because they forgot they already had.

Merging folds those conversations into one place to answer from — without breaking the ticket references your requesters are already holding.

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Doing a merge

1. In the inbox, select the tickets that are the same thing — Ctrl+click or Shift+click, exactly as on the Selecting several tickets page.
2. Right-click any of them and choose Merge N tickets…
3. Pick which ticket the others should be merged into, check what the dialog says will happen, and click Merge.

The dialog spells out, in plain words, what your install is configured to do — because "merge" means slightly different things depending on the settings below, and you shouldn't have to remember which.

Merge is only offered when two or more tickets are selected.

What happens to the reference

This is the part worth understanding, because it's what stops merging causing problems weeks later.

A merged-away ticket is never deleted. It keeps its own reference forever, stays searchable, and shows a banner at the top saying where its conversation went, with a button to jump there. So when someone asks "whatever happened to ABC-452-98881?", the answer is always findable.

More importantly: a customer replying to an old email about that ticket still reaches you. Every notification FreeITSM sends carries the ticket reference in its subject line, and those emails sit in people's inboxes for years. FreeITSM follows the merge and lands their reply on the live ticket — not on a closed one nobody is watching.

The AI briefing

If you have an AI provider configured (Tickets → Settings → Reply cleanup), FreeITSM reads the combined conversation after the merge and writes a short briefing in two parts:

• What has been asked — who reported what, with people grouped together when they reported the same thing
• What has been done — what the desk has already tried, asked for, or promised, and anything still outstanding

It appears as you watch, rather than making you wait on a spinner. You can edit it before saving — it's the model's reading of the conversation, not gospel — and it saves as an internal note, so the requester never sees it. Choose No note if you'd rather not keep it.

Merging works perfectly well with no AI configured; you simply don't get the briefing.

The note is labelled as AI-written, both on screen and in the saved text, so nobody reading the ticket in six months mistakes it for a colleague's conclusion.

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Settings: Tickets → Settings → Merge behaviour

These apply to everyone, not per analyst. A merge changes what the customer sees, so two people answering the same mailbox mustn't be able to disagree about it.

What the reference becomes

Option	What happens
One of the existing tickets (default)	The ticket you pick keeps its reference and stays open. The others close and point at it. Nothing a requester has been told becomes a dead reference, and the surviving ticket keeps its original age and SLA clock.
A brand-new ticket	Every selected ticket closes and a new reference is created holding all of them. A clean slate — but every reference your requesters already hold becomes a redirect, and the new ticket's clock starts today.

In "brand-new" mode the ticket you pick in the dialog still matters: the new ticket takes its department, priority, type and owner from it.

What happens to the original conversations

Option	What happens
Moved into the merged ticket (default)	Every message becomes part of the merged ticket's conversation, labelled with where it came from. Readable inline, quotable in a reply, and found by search.
Moved in, and also attached as HTML files	As above, plus a self-contained HTML copy of each original ticket attached to the merged one — useful when you need to hand a complete record to someone outside FreeITSM.
Attached as HTML files only	The messages stay on their original tickets; the merged ticket gets only the attached copies. Tidiest merged ticket — but search will no longer find the merged conversations, because search reads messages, not attachments.

⚠️ That search trade-off is the one to think about. "Which ticket mentioned the Sage licence?" quietly stops working for anything merged under the HTML-only option.

Are those HTML attachments safe to open?

Yes, and deliberately so — they contain messages written by whoever emailed your service desk, so they're treated as untrusted:

• They are downloaded, never displayed inside FreeITSM, so nothing in them can act as you.
• Scripts, tracking images, embedded frames and clickable javascript: links are stripped when the snapshot is made — ordinary formatting, tables and links survive.
• They're served with the same permission check as every other attachment: you can only download one from a ticket you're allowed to open.

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What merging does not do

Being straight about the edges:

• It cannot be undone from the app. The dialog says so before you commit.
• Up to 20 tickets in one merge.
• Same company only on a multi-company install — folding one client's conversation into another client's ticket is refused.
• Splitting a ticket is not built yet. Merging is one direction only for now.
• Tickets already merged, or in the Trash, can't be merged again.

Where the history lives

What	Where
Which ticket went where, when, and who did it	The merge log (ticket_merges), kept forever
"Merged into X" / "Merged in Y"	The audit trail on both tickets
The relationship	Also recorded as a Duplicate of link, so the Links section agrees with the banner

See also

• Selecting several tickets — how to gather the tickets to merge
• Merging Tickets — Developer Guide — how it works under the hood
• Linking tickets — for when tickets are related but shouldn't be combined
• Tickets — the inbox this lives in