The Challenge

Picture this: bug reports flying in from everywhere except where you want them.

This growing SaaS team had a nice issue reporting form that nobody used. Instead, customers emailed developers directly, pinged on Slack, forwarded random support emails — basically anywhere except the actual tracking system.

"We spent more time hunting down and copy-pasting issues than actually fixing them," their lead dev explained.

grep -r "bug" ~/email ~/slack ~/support-tickets

Found 47 unique issues across 12 different channels

Only 3 are in the official tracker

Estimated manual processing time: 15-20 min per issue

The Solution

They stopped fighting human nature and embraced it instead.

Created a central intake email (issues@ingest.company.com), set up forwarding rules, and let EmailConnect handle the chaos. All those scattered emails get parsed into clean JSON, fed into an AI workflow that extracts the real issue, figures out priority, and auto-creates GitHub tickets.

They even connected their Slack bot to the same endpoint.

Best part? The AI sends personalized responses back: "Thanks! We've logged this as high priority issue #1247 and expect to tackle it next sprint."

{
  "issue_report": {
    "source": "email",
    "sender": "frustrated.user@customer.com",
    "subject": "Login broken AGAIN!!!",
    "priority": "high",
    "category": "authentication",
    "description": "Can't log in since yesterday. Tried Chrome/Safari. Got some session expired error.",
    "environment": {
      "browser": "Chrome 120",
      "os": "macOS",
      "user_agent": "extracted from email signature"
    },
    "steps_to_reproduce": [
      "Go to login page",
      "Enter email and password",
      "Click login button",
      "See 'session expired' error"
    ]
  },
  "auto_response": "Thanks! We've logged this as high priority issue #147 and will solve it within 24hrs.",
  "ticket_created": "https://github.com/company/issues/1247"
}

The Integration Architecture

They built a simple but powerful workflow:

1. Central intake email catches everything
2. Slack forwarding via slash command /report-issue
3. EmailConnect parsing extracts structured data
4. AI classification determines priority and category
5. GitHub API creates properly formatted issues
6. Automated responses keep users in the loop

The Results

What used to take 15-20 minutes per issue now happens in seconds.

• Response times improved 60% because nothing falls through cracks anymore
• Developers can actually develop instead of doing data entry
• Users can report issues however feels natural to them
• Perfect audit trail with GitHub integration
• AI learns patterns and gets smarter over time