# Contact Triage Loop – Draft-Stage Contact-First Approach (2026-07-09)

**Status**: Draft / exploratory. Intended as a lightweight, iterative starting point that can be tested manually in small batches before any automation is written.

**Context**: This note captures the refined direction discussed on 2026-07-09 for cleaning the customer-service project (currently >1700 open tickets). The previous keyword-on-subject approach is deprioritized. The stronger signal is **contact-first review** using recent activity history.

## Core Principle (Contact-First)
- Group decisions by **contact** (author/email) rather than individual tickets.
- For each contact, examine their **most recent 3–5 tickets/messages**.
- Decide whether that contact (and most of their open tickets) can be safely closed as spam, stale, promotional, or low-value.
- This directly targets the observed pattern that many spam/low-value tickets come from the same small set of repeat contacts.

## Draft Workflow (Repeatable in Small Batches)

1. **Discover candidate contacts**  
   Find authors with multiple open tickets whose most recent activity is old or low-value.  
   Starting signals:
   - Authors with 5+ open tickets
   - Authors whose most recent ticket is >60–90 days old
   - Contacts whose tickets are mostly short/generic with zero follow-up

2. **Per-contact review (the decision step)**  
   For each contact, review their last 3–5 tickets and ask:
   - Is this contact mainly sending spam, sales pitches, or unrelated noise?
   - Has there been any meaningful reply or resolution path in the last 60–90 days?
   - Are the tickets duplicates, test messages, or one-off low-value imports?
   - Do they match existing `spam` or `promotional` tag patterns?

3. **Close decision rules**  
   Close most or all of a contact’s open tickets if any of the following are true:
   - Recent pattern is clearly spam/stale/no-value
   - No meaningful activity or resolution path in 90+ days
   - Tickets are duplicates or low-value imports

   **Do not close** if the contact shows any recent legitimate customer issue or money-related matter.

4. **Execution & logging**  
   - Use existing Redmine MCP tools or the semantic search CLI on mcpness for discovery.
   - Apply `spam`/`promotional` tags where appropriate for future filtering.
   - Record a short note on the contact or in a running log (which contacts were reviewed and outcome).

5. **Guardrails**  
   - Never close tickets involving money, formal complaints, or recent customer replies.
   - When in doubt, skip the contact.
   - After bulk cleanup, maintain a monthly review of “Open tickets from contacts with no activity in 60+ days.”

## Why This Stays Draft-Stage for Now
- Allows manual testing on the first 10–20 worst contacts to see what the real data looks like.
- Validates the contact-history signal before investing in looping scripts or automation.
- Directly supports shrinking the 1700+ open ticket count with low risk.

## Next Natural Steps (for the other thread)
- Run the first discovery pass on the worst offending contacts using current tools.
- Refine the decision questions or tagging rules based on what the contacts actually show.
- Decide whether to move any part of this into a lightweight script once the manual pattern is validated.

This note is a clean hand-off for the active thread working on the contact triage loop project.