E-Mails are not deleted on mail server after processing

[Hauke Gulich]

We use Jira Service Desk to receive E-Mails and create issues / update issue with "Email this issue".

Everything works like it should, only that the emails will not be deleted on the server. 

I saw several post about this topic and found this note:

Note — how JIRA handles messages on a mail server/service:

• For mail accounts, JIRA scans email messages received by your mail account's 'Inbox' folder. However, for IMAP mail servers, you can specify a different folder within your mail account.
• If JIRA successfully processes a message, JIRA deletes the message from your mail account (on a POP or IMAP mail server) or file system (i.e. for file system messages).
• If JIRA does not successfully process a message, the message will remain either in your mail account or on the file system.

Well the issues will be created and updated without any problems, so I think that should be the problem. Also I couldn't find any settings for "not deleting messages".

Some other posts had the same issue 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Incoming-mail-not-deleted/qaq-p/127276

but in that case the E-Mail was received everytime and created a new issue everytime the scanner scanned the mailbox. This is not happing here. We receive the mail only once (jira processes the mail only once).

The mail log says (on mailserver side)

Jan 18 12:29:14 pop3(accountname): Info: Disconnected: Logged out top=261/564312, retr=0/0, del=0/261, size=3577823

del 0/261 is not good. We tried to delete one message by hand with a regular email client in order to check if we do have the permissions. And that worked fine.

Does anyone has an idea?

Thanks 

Hauke

[Andy Heinzer]

There are a couple of different possible reasons for this.  First off, the specific section you cited comes from the Jira Core documentation: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver073/creating-issues-and-comments-from-email-861253784.html

In this case, since you're using Service Desk, it might not accurately apply.  Instead I'd recommend the Service Desk equivalent of https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskserver0315/receiving-requests-by-email-957506110.html

In both cases, when using pop, the message are expected to be deleted after they are processed.   One way this might not happen is if the inbox had messages in it when the mail handler was created, it won't remove what already was in the inbox before the time these were linked.  What are the dates of the messages in that inbox?  Are they all very recent?  Have you made any changes to Jira's mail handler here recently?

If that doesn't help, then the other concern I would have would be to understand if the plugin 'email this issue' is having any effect on this behavior.  This plugin is known to manage emails in a different manner than what Jira or Jira Service Desk would do natively.   I'm not sure what changes this plugin would cause in Jira, but perhaps it could alter the default behavior of deleting messages after they are processed by Jira.