JIRA Software / Service Desk Mail Configuration

[Stephen Hayden]

After being on legacy licensing with way too many agents for years, we only recently moved to data center, and one remaining pain point is email.  All JIRA mail comes from a single address.  The pain point (that I'm sure some already see coming without reading further) is customers responding to Service Desk emails.

Is there no way for the built in email handlers to comment as a customer?  it seems our cleanest / best option for every service desk (we have 40+) to have it's own email configured to send/receive from, otherwise responses processed by JIRA attempt to comment on issues as if everyone is an agent resulting in permission errors and missed comments.

Could we perhaps just maintain our single address and have mailbox rules sort them into folders, then have the Service Desks go and pick up mail from just their folders?  We'd miss some occasional subject changes but the problem would be largely mitigated.

We do have JIRA Email This Issue available to us, but we typically use that just for outgoing mail.

[Stephen Hayden · Accepted solution]

My solution that I'm testing live now on one project:

Setup mail rules and folders to redirect incoming mail that are responses to Service Desk issues

- example: inbox/ServiceDesks/KEY

Setup a mail handler in JIRA to check mail in that folder, use the Email this issue mail handler

In JIRA Email This Issue, define the strategy as Service Desk create/comment.

By doing this I am successfully able to process mail and comment on requests as a customer, without creating mailboxes for each Service Desk.

There may be some gotchas with people changing subjects, but until that's recognized as a larger problem those become coaching opportunities.

Anything not filtered will get processed as normal, and we'll monitor our central errors mailbox for processes we need to address in this way going forward.

Anyone see any problems with this approach?