Emails w/ same subject not creating new issues in JSM

[Keith Jones]

We are using JSM (cloud) and I'm trying to understand a certain behavior. We have an individual that sent multiple emails (original emails, not replies) to our email channel. They all have the same subject and for the most part, the same body with a few details changed. 

After the first issue was created, subsequent emails were added as comments, some of them days apart. 

The emails are all original emails created in Outlook - no Jira headers, no issue key involved. I would expect them to create unique issues in Jira. Is there an explanation of the logic used in determining creation vs comment (other than the basic issue key or header info)?

[Keith Jones · Accepted solution]

Okay, with the help of Jira support, we found out the cause. Jira Service Management inbound email uses these rules:

1. If an existing Jira issue key is found on the email subject, Jira will process the email and update the Jira issue with a comment.
2. If no Jira issue key is found on the subject, the in-reply-to header will be inspected and compared to the data inside the database. If a match is found, the existing Jira issue will be updated with a comment. 

The user in question was copying (forwarding) an original email and changing some relevant information in the body. So the emails were linked together with values in the In-Reply_To and Message-ID fields in the email header. 

[Jack Brickey]

Thanks for sharing. I think the magic is in number two and it is not necessarily a black-and-white or binary algorithm so different results may be observed.

[Keith Jones]

Exactly. Questions still remain - how does this work when using an email template? What if the subject is a little different, but the information is still in the header? And so on... I'm going to play around a bit to see if I can nail down some specific actions.

[Jack Brickey]

Yep. I wish there was a clean answer but I haven’t found it.

[Jack Brickey]

yep...confusing. It used to be that it would behave as you have laid out here. However a few months back I noted the same thing that you are seeing. After a bit of research I found that the algorithm had been updated and JSM attempts to be a bit smarter and if it recognizes the subject from the same individual then it adds comments even though the issue key is not part of the subject.

[Keith Jones]

Screenshot added. You can see that it created new issues for the first 3, then started creating new emails as comments. Not only that, but the comments were first associated with the latest issue created, then suddenly it started putting them in as comments on the first issue created.