What is the best way to get a direct email in to JIRA service desk?

[Keith Slater]

If some one emails me directly, what is the best way to get that email into JIRA service desk? Should I just forward the email? How could I get it in there so that service desk knows who the customer is? If I forward it, won't it think I'm the customer?

[Mark Pleake · Accepted solution]

I've had excellent success using Jira Project Automation plugin to take forwarded and reply emails from myself and my team, and add them as tickets automatically.

The rule in place I use most does the following:

1. If it's a member of our team, the issue is assigned to the team member that replied/forwarded the message.  The intent being 'email yourself things "todo" and a request will be generated in jira assigned to you for that purpose'

2. If the team member CC'd a customer, then the customer is made the "reporter" in the issue.  Many customers email team members directly. This way a reply can still be personal, no need to tell customers to redirect to portal or request email, simply cc the request email and a request is generated on their behalf.  Combined with rule #1 it greatly simplifies customer interaction and makes it personal and trackable.

3. If the team member is replying to a customer, and cannot work the ticket themselves, the add a triage keyword (##triage) somewhere in the email which is caught by automation and then redirects the request as Unassigned, and it can be triaged.

4. if the team member expects the issue to be immediately resolved, they can also use the keyword to trigger resolved. ##resolved comments/email will transition the request this way.

Example of this would be replying to a customer, CC, the service desk email, and explaining that they'll input the issue to the system, then either 1. find someone to assist or assist themselves.

Customer is automatically added to the issue and all comment/replies go into the issue. 
ALSO customers generally are OK with replying to comments, which is great because this is logged and allows the entire team to see the email thread.

[Nick Heurter]

@Mark Pleake this sounds exactly what I need to implement in our own system! Could you point me in the right direction how to configure this? :) That would be really really helpful! Thanks already in advance!

[Mark Pleake]

@Nick Heurter 

Two things helped me tremendously to get this working properly:

1. Using the API to reveal the true field names for custom fields, based on real data in your system that you can easily identify:

http://<your.DNS.Instance.Name>/jira/rest/api/2/issue/<issue-ID-from_project>

this lets you see all the fields exposed to the API by their machine names, which project automation can use for its automation, and is more precise to work with *IF* it's not a built in function (like append label didn't used to have its own function so I had to write it manually with the 'real' field name).

2. Identifying the small regex quirks that allowed searches based on keywords
     so, for Project Automation I choose compare two values, and add:
  {{issue.description}}|{{issue.summary}}   
as the first value (This captures the body and subject of an email, the pipe is an or expression here.
select compare type of "Contains regular expression" and compare with a simple:

(?i)keyword|alternate keyword|alternate phrase such as distinct subject

I'm not terribly good at regex, but use regex builder if I needed to get more complicated than keywords, keeping in mind that this is a specific type of regex that Jira uses and that's why (?i) prepends the match to signify case doesn't matter.

I'm checking to see if there's a way to export our rules because I've actually had multiple projects request similar configurations and it's pretty flexible, PLUS does NOT require full Jira Admin privileges to implement in this way.

[Nick Heurter]

@Mark Pleake thanks a lot for your quick reply!! Keep on rockin!

To be honest I don't quite follow your steps, but it seems really challenging 😁. I noticed that I needed to use the url https://<your.DNS.Instance.Name>/rest/api/3/issue/<issue-ID-from_project> instead of https://<your.DNS.Instance.Name>/jira/rest/api/2/issue/<issue-ID-from_project>. But from here I don't know what to do.

It would be awesome if you could export your rules or maybe take a bunch of screenshots so this can be copied. Your solutions is really cool mate, you've got gold in your hand haha. I can't wait to add this to our own automations to see how this works.

Thanks again already in advance!

[Nick Heurter]

@Mark Pleake sorry for bothering you again. And I fully understand if you don't want to invest your time on this. But if would be great for us to use your setup to make sure forwarding emails works like a charm. If you want to, could you help us with this setup? Thanks already for your reply mate!

[Kirstin Seidel-Gebert · Accepted solution]

Hi Keith,

yes, if you forward a customer's mail to your service desk, it will "think" that you are the reporter and create an issue accordingly.

The only way is to do it like Jeff suggested (create the ticket manually) or to explain to the customer to send a copy to the service desk (as Paulo suggested).

If the customer already has an account, you could forward the mail to your service desk and change the reporter afterwards. Perhaps this saves time in comparison to manual creation of the ticket.
A drawback of this approach is that the customer will not be notified about the issue creation in this case. You have to make a comment to notify the customer about his issue.

Cheers,
Kirstin

[Jeff Tillett · Accepted solution]

We always have to manually create the ticket ourselves, manually inputting the customers information. I am watching this topic to see if there are any better answers. 

[ksg]

Our case is that we have JSD issues that are created by no-reply mail addresses that do not reflect the real reporter.
We then manually change the reporter to the real one BUT we recently discovered that there might be problems with customer notifications if the reporter of a JSD issue is changed. Some customers received no notifications in this case.

Did you encounter the same problem, @Jeff Tillett?

[Jeff Tillett]

Any notifications sent prior to the reporter change would not be resent, so the "We got your request, and your ticket number is X" notification would never be received since that only goes out at creation.

How are no-reply messages hitting Jira in the first place? These are usually the result of some unmonitored system notifying you of something, and shouldn't be used to represent a real person, as real people have real email addresses. Attacking the root cause might be beneficial here.

If you can't get around that, then you could set up a custom workflow action to modify the report and trigger a new notification event to resend the initial notification or a custom one of your choosing.

[Petr Divina]

Hello,

instead of forwarding, redirect such customer e-mail to the service desk e-mail address and it will look in the service desk as if the e-mail was received directly from the customer. Depending on the incoming e-mail handler settings (e.g. in JETI add-on) the Reporter and Request participants can be extracted from the Mail headers.

The mail redirection can be achieved for example by Mail Redirect plugin for Thunderbird - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mailredirect/ .

Cheers,
Petr

[Kirstin Seidel-Gebert]

Wouldn't he need authorization to send mails in name of someone else? I tried this with Outlook (no plugin) and I couldn't send a mail in name of my workmate.

[Petr Divina]

In Outlook, you can also redirect (resend) using this approach. http://email.about.com/od/outlooktips/qt/et_redirect.htm

[Kirstin Seidel-Gebert]

Yes, that's exactly what I tried. But it didn't work. I had no permission to send a mail on behalf of my workmate.

[vanderheiden]

Not in Outlook for Mac....

[Paulo Hennig]

Hello Keith,

From my point of view, this is not a good idea since this will raise tickets from all your received emails. Probably you'll receive contents about personal emails and other things which are not suppose to be inside the JIRA Service Desk. However, maybe I didn't get very well your goal, could you kindly describe it to us?

I'd advice you to explain to your customers about the tool and when they have to raise tickets about any incident, they can send an email to you with a copy to your Service Desk mail channel. So, the created ticket will set the reporter the user who send the email out.