Jira Service Desk email handler replies to default to Internal Comments

[Seth Burgman]

We have recently started using Jira Service Desk and overall it has been working well for us. Occasionally, we find ourselves in a situation where we have a non-agent specialist consulting on an issue via email. The specialists are registered as customers in JSD automatically due to the "anyone can raise a request by email" setting on the project. The specialist will reply or include the issue key in their subject and the response is posted to the issue as a public comment.

Is there a way to change this behavior so that replies to issues done via email by specific customers or organizations are posted as internal comments instead? If not, what would be the best way to collaborate with a third party through the service desk on an issue without having the responses notify the original reporters and participants?

I saw a few posts suggest using a Jira email handler instead of the service desk one but figured I would ask here to see if there was another solution.

Thanks!

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

If you setup a third party on a service desk with agent role but do not give them an agent license but a JIRA license you can add them as a watcher then they will be able to collaborate and their comments will be internal.   This solution requires them to have a JIRA core licence on your instance.  

If you do this you will need to make sure that:

1. Your permissions are setup properly so they do not see all of your projects or service desks in your instance when they login.
2. They will be able to see all issues in the service desk by default.  If you have multiple vendors and you do not want them to see all issues you can use issue type security to prevent them from seeing issues that are not related to them.