Raising an issue automatically via email with responses from Microsoft form

[Dina Nikandrou]

Hello,

I'm trying to automate issues creation in a board through request received via email. The requests are raised via a Microsoft form & with power automate I have set up the responses of the form to be delivered to a team monitored email address. I'm trying to understand once responses are received with an email how I can use this email to automatically raise an issue to the team board to manage work load & requests. 

Any help will be much appreciated :)

[Olha Yevdokymova_SaaSJet]

Hi @Dina Nikandrou  👋

You’re definitely on the right path using Microsoft Forms + Power Automate, but parsing email content into Jira issues can get tricky — especially when trying to map specific answers into Jira fields reliably.

If you're open to another approach, I’d recommend checking out Smart Forms for Jira as a much cleaner and more structured option.

Here’s how it works:

• You recreate your Microsoft Form using Smart Forms for Jira

• Then, you can embed the form directly in your email (via an inline iframe element) or simply add a link to the form in the body of the email

• When someone clicks and submits, Smart Forms can automatically create a Jira issue in your board — and you can map form fields directly to issue fields (like summary, priority, description, even custom fields)

• You can also trigger workflows like assigning issues or setting status based on form selections

This avoids the need to extract form data from incoming emails, gives your team more control, and results in much cleaner issue creation.

Let me know if you’d like a walkthrough or a sample embedded form link — happy to help! 🚀

[Dina Nikandrou]

Thanks Olha for your response but i can't consider a paid solution at this time.

[Darryl Lee]

Hi @Dina Nikandrou -

So you technically could add enable your project to Create work items and comments from email and then create an Outlook rule to forward emails from your team email to the project email address.

However it would simply dump the body of the email into the Description field, and the Summary would be generated from the subject of the email.

You probably really want data from various fields in the Microsoft Form to go into the correct fields in Jira.

Now technically this can be done with Jira Automation, using regular expressions to parse the Description:

• How to parse issues' description using Automation?

HOWEVER depending on the tier of Power Automate you have, I would suggest using a Jira connector that would more easily take data from your Microsoft Form and get it directly into the corresponding Jira fields.

This automation would be far less fragile than using regular expressions, which can be... fiddly, depending on the complexity of your data.

[Dina Nikandrou]

Thanks a lot Darryl for your response.

Yes I'm aware of the Jira connection in Power Automate but unfortunately it needs premium license which I don't have, hence I'm exploring other options where there won't be an extra cost.

I suppose instead of creating a rule to forward emails from my team's email to the project email address, I can just use the project email address for the responses of the form to be sent there directly? Where can i find the project email address? Is there a specific project type I need to create to enable this functionality?

I've read about the configuration of a mail handlers & I'm slightly confused. Do I need to Add incoming mail server or Add incoming mail handler and then the Catch Email Address should be my team's email address (or project's email address)?

[Darryl Lee]

Hi Dina - apologies - it's been a while since I've set this up, so I was a bit confused.

In Jira Service Management there are built-in project mailboxes. If by chance you are on JSM, this makes things very easy: How do customers send requests by email? 

But since this is in the Jira forum, then you're probably dealing with Jira Software.

So, in answer to your question, YES you could have the form emails go directly to a specific mailbox that is "polled" by Jira for new messages. 

Let's break down how this works (ideally):

• Cloud Jira has a Default Cloud Mail Server (jira@YOURHOST.atlassian.net)
  • By default this is set up to catch emails when people reply to Jira notifications. Those emails will get added as comments to issues.

For your specific case you'd want need to set up a DIFFERENT Mail Server (hosted on your company's Exchange, Gmail, etc.) that when it receives emails, new issues get created.

You do have to take all the steps you mentioned:

• Add incoming mail server
  • Basically this is working with your IT team to set up a connection from Jira to the mail server (e.g. Exchange, Google, etc.) via Oauth AND
  • Your IT team will need to set up a new account/mailbox JUST for creating tickets for your project AND
  • You'll need to get the login details for the new account so you can set that up in Jira.
• Configure a mail handler
  • This is where you would "map" this account to your specific project, so that when new emails are found, Jira automatically creates issues from them.

This is somewhat complicated, but the process has been around a long time:

• Create work items and comments from email 

If you connect with your IT team they should be able to understand most of the details there.

P.S. If your IT team refuses to work with you to get connected with your mail server or create a mailbox for this purpose, there is a workaround:

• Configure a Catch Email Address in Jira to Filter Incoming Emails

Basically you would add a Handler to create new issues in your project if they are "originally" sent to PROJECTFORM@YOURCOMPANY.COM.

You'd then need to set up a forwarding rule for your team email address that sends it on to the Default Cloud Mail Server address (jira@YOURHOST.atlassian.net).