Jira how to identify issues created manually vs those created via email handler

[Chris Shepherd]

Hi folks,

I'm wondering if anyone has a solution to this issue, or if I have missed something quite basic.

We have issues created manually by users & generated using the email handler.  I need to be able to tell the difference between the two, so that I can allocate them to different users using a script.

The allocation is not a problem, the difficult part is telling where the issue has come from.  So is there anyway to tell in a workflow how the issue was created ?

The only solution I could come up with is for the email handler to create a different issue type, but that is not an option in our environment for various reasons.

thanks in advance 

Chris

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I'm afraid JIRA doesn't record the source of an issue explicitly.

The closest you can get without coding is to have a field on the create screen that is optional and defaults to a value, then you'll know that when it is filled in, a human did it, rather than an email.  (Although this won't stop the human blanking it out, most won't bother)

[Chris Shepherd]

By jove I think he's got it! The extra field option should do exactly what I want. Thanks Nic.

[William Crighton [CCC]]

@Chris Shepherd - just to add a bit to Nic's answer if you set the field via a post function (update issue field, or update issue custom field) then you avoid instances where the user foils the plan by blanking the field out. In our EZGooey handler I think we have an option to add a comment during create that you can use to say 'created via email received from blah'. That might have just been an idea we had during design, but I think it made it into (one of) the released versions. -wc

[Chris Shepherd]

Thanks @William Crighton I hadn't seen EZGooey before and it looks like a product we could find a lot of uses for and the price is very reasonable too :)

[William Crighton [CCC]]

@Chris Shepherd - yea, the EZGooey Mail Handler was quite popular a few years ago - one reason was that it was free, and the other was that it provided functionality unavailable anywhere else. Plus it had a nice simple user GUI to configure the handler options. In 2011 my team of 3 (at the time) was completely _enthralled_ with migrating PayPal from ClearQuest to JIRA, with all the process improvements and process re-engineering that could be thought up by the powers that were. And it was an awesome project....that nearly killed us with an unending string of 20 hour days to finish the custom work required to migrate ALL of their existing CQ data/issues over into JIRA. Jeez that tool (CQ) totally sucks. Anyway, we had about 5 plugins with a combined download count of around 10K-12K which was quite healthy for the time. All of them were free and none of them were updated since we had big names breathing down on us to 'get it done'....so that you haven't heard of it, and you might hear bad things about it from the support aspect, well, those things did definitely occur. But our Dev group is much better tuned now and we have some really nifty stuff coming out over the next few months. You can see more about what we've got here: * https://marketplace.atlassian.com/vendors/15040 Thanks for taking a look at EZG - we're pretty proud of it. -wc

[Chris Shepherd]

That's all good @William Crighton [CCC] , we already use your last comment add in so I have no doubt we will be getting EZGooey before long. Just need to agree our workflow with the powers that be now. Chris