The message was rejected because it is auto-reply mail

[LeRon Atkins]

We recently switched our email provider from Gmail to a hosted Microsoft Exchange environment. Since that change, incoming request to help@ourdomain.com and support@ourdomain.com are rejected with the 'The message was rejected because it is auto-reply mail' message. 

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @LeRon Atkins

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Your issue is probably being caused because the Jira email handlers are reading the header of the emails sent and they are returning Auto-Submitted: auto-generated, so the system automatically rejects the email.

In order to properly avoid this problem, you can configure your allow list to make the email handlers from Jira to stop filtering out those emails:

1. From your service desk project, select Project settings () > Email requests.

2. Select Manage allowlist from the more menu

3. Select +Add domain name.

4. Enter the domain name and save.

You can check more details in the documentation below:

How are domains added to the allowlist? 

Let us know if you have any questions.

[LeRon Atkins]

We had previously tried this solution. However, we were able to solve the problem. Our exchange server had previously been utilizing a distribution group to the email accounts in question. We since then created a separate email mailbox to handle incoming mail to this account rather than route it with a distribution group. It now works just fine. Thank you for your response.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @LeRon Atkins

Thank you for letting us know the steps you took to solve your issue.

Have a nice week ahead.

[Nick Read]

Hi @Petter Gonçalves ,  I'm having a similar problem.

We receive emails from mainly one domain: @examplecustomer.com, which is on our allow list. 

Most emails are received OK, but there's one specific email (service.desk@examplecustomer.com) where the email is rejected and we receive the "The message was rejected because it is auto-reply mail" error. 

Do you know what could be causing this problem with the one specific email, and how we fix it?

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @Nick Read

The error returned to you has the same root cause as the one described by LeRon before: The email sent from "service.desk@examplecustomer.com" is being configured with the header Auto-Submitted: auto-generated, so it's being filtered by the email handlers of Jira.

This is a security approach to avoid spam from arriving in your JSD, as explained in the feature request below:

To provide incoming white-list email address function for email marked as bulk / jira / spam 

Otherwise from changing the header of the email sent, you can prevent this error from happening by following the steps of the documentation below:

How are domains added to the allowlist? 

Can you confirm if you tried this and still receiving the error?

[Nick Read]

Hi @Petter Gonçalves . Yes, the domain is on the allow list. We receive lots of other emails from that domain, but it's the one address that causing us a problem. 

Some more info - the emails are sent from a freshservice.com backed service desk. I'm told that they have "a response link to that email which updates the tickets automatically". We previously received emails from this address to Jira software project with no problem.  

[Nick Read]

@Petter Gonçalves , any idea on this at all? It's causing quite a lot of issues for one of our main customers.