How to handle emails from non-customers on restricted Service Desk

[Barry Goed]

Dear Service Desk guru's,

We have started with the implementation of JIRA Service Desk for our organisations ICT department.

This means that only employees should be able to create issues and access the portal and email us their requests. So we created user accounts for all our employees and linked our mailbox to Service Desk.

But now we have a small issue.

What to do with emails that are originating from non-customers? Or from a personal employees email address when they can't access their account for example.

Currently the system sets the email to read and does not process it further.

Example:

User has a company email address user@comp.com. The user also has a private email user@private.com.

When the user mails our Service Desk with their company address the system automatically creates an issue and set the email as read.

When the user mails our Service Desk with their private address the system does not create an issue and sets the email as read.

There is no warning, message or any visual reference on which email the system picked up or not.

What are our options to handle these emails? If we go live with this, certain emails send to our Service Desk will be lost...

[Merlin]

+1

We have similar problem. How can we ensure that no one gets left behind, without making the portal public? There should be at least a notification in place when a non-customer email tried to reach the help desk.

[Jack Brickey]

@Barry Goed, what issue are you experiencing w/ emails from accounts that are not users (customers or agents)? As long as you have JSD setup to only allow users access that have been added by agent/admin then you do not need to worry w/ ‘non-user’ emails. 

[Barry Goed]

Dear @Jack Brickey. My apologies for the late reply.

The problem we will get is that when non-user emails come in the mailbox they are also placed as "read" just like normal emails but it won't be added as an issue.

I will edit my question with an example.

[Esraa Mahmoud]

Relevant feature request please vote: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-2262 

[mattgosnell]

I wrote a powershell script which query's the backend database and sends an email to a support admin if the service desk gets an email but cant process it. Its pretty basic and could be made to email a customer with tinkering I'm sure.  Can share with anybody if interested. 

(works only on windows with powershell with MSsql db.

As this is accessing the database directly its clearly not Atlassian support friendly but the script only needs read access so dont see the harm in it.

[Danny Holyoake]

Hey, I'd be very interested in seeing your Powershell script, if you're still able to share it! 

[Matt Gosnell]

Hi Danny, Not sure I can post raw code here and don't want to create a repo just for this... I have connected on LinkedIn and will send it to you.. We still use this script everyday!

[Carlos Reimers]

Hi Matt,

could you also please add me and provide me with the code? I am facing the same problem as you....

Many greetings
Carlos

[Holly Ryall]

Hi Matt,

Would you also be able to provide this code to me? We're having the same challenge with our new Jira instance. We brought on additional teams and the need to be able to interact with external users but we do not want to make our SD public.

Thank you!

[Matt Gosnell]

Hi Holly.

I sure can. Have messaged on LinkedIn. Hopefully I found the right you by your avatar!

[David Drong-Reisch]

Upvote!

Same thing here. Our costumers are writing from different mail aliases and are ignored by us because we and they get no information about the ticket which wasnt created.

ATLASSIAN PLZ FIX IT

A simple customer notification option would do the job....

[Dave Sheldon]

Same problem here....why is this even an issue for a product of this size and adoption? Seems odd that there's no solution. 

[Philip_Bloom]

We also have the same problem. Still no solution?

[Matt Gosnell]

+1 Same issue here... Silently discarding an email or opening up you whole site to anyone is like being stuck between a rock and a hard place.. Its the ONLY reason we stopped work on adopting JSD and are looking at other solutions.. Did anyone come up with a workaround? 

[Chris P.]

+1 vote.  We have the same problem.  Due to limitation in JSD that you cannot add an entire domain to represent customers (i.e.  @companyname.com ) , we need to add customers one by one via their individual email addresses as a customer.

If a customer who is NOT yet added JSD sends an email, is there a way to auto-reply / perform an automated "Customer Notification" that let's them know they are not yet setup as a customer from this email address?

Right now > if a customer who is NOT a customer on JSD sends an email to create a ticket in a JSD project, they get zero response, and we have no way of knowing that a non-customer submitted a request, unless we check our mail servers manually, or use our mail servers to trigger a duplicate notification.

This has the potential of severely throwing off our SLA response times, if the customer thinks they have in fact submitted a ticket properly, and the SLA timer has begun.

[Catrine Lundström]

I wish I had an answer but on the opposit - I have the same problem.... How can I catch emails from non-customers that only end up in email log in the projects? Without manually have to check the log on a regular basis..