CS team member's Out of Office message being sent to client when they comment on an issue

Alan Butcher

Hello all, 

We have an issue when one of our customer success members sets an OOO message, sometimes it sends an OOO email to our clients when the client comments on their ticket.

For example, the client submits a bug ticket, our CS member is listed as a watcher, our CS member goes on vacation and sets an OOO in their Gmail, the client makes a comment on the ticket, and the client gets an email from the CS member that they are OOO. 

We do have notifications set up to send an email to watches when an issue is commented on. As far as I know it does not happen all of the time, and only with one CS member, is this a fluke or something the CS member needs to configure? 

Earl McCutcheon

Hello @Alan Butcher ,

Welcome to the community. 

Out-of-office replies should have a special "Auto-reply" header that Jira can ignore when parsing email Inbox. Please check the following documentation for more information under the section "Per-Processing tips":

• https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/create-issues-and-comments-from-email/

If anyone on the Datacenter platform finds this thread with a similar issue the Data Center version of the documentation can be found at the following link under the section "Best practices (pre-processing Jira email messages)":

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/creating-issues-and-comments-from-email-938847641.html

Noting the following:

Pre-processing tips

For additional mail servers you link to Jira applications, we recommend the following pre-processing tips: 

• Because Jira mail handlers remove successfully processed email messages from your mail server, have your mail sent to a backup folder to maintain a record of what mail has been processed by Jira. 

• If your mail folder contains replies to Jira email notifications, set up rules that filter out auto-replies and bounces. If you do not do this, there is a strong possibility of mail loops between Jira and autoresponders like "out of office" notifications. Jira sets a Precedence:bulk header (unless you have disabled this) and an Auto-Submitted header on outgoing email, but some autoresponders ignore it. The following rules (in procmail format) will detect most auto-replies:

  ^From:.*mailer-daemon@
  ^Auto-Submitted:.auto-
  ^Content-Type:\ multipart/report;\ report-type=delivery-status
  ^Subject:\ Delivery\ Status\ Notification
  ^Subject:\ Undeliverable
  ^Subject: Returned Mail:
  ^From:\ System\ Administrator
  ^Precedence:\ auto_reply
  ^Subject:.*autoreply
  ^Subject:.*Account\ signup
      
  

  Even with these rules, you may encounter auto-replies with nothing in the headers to distinguish it from a regular mail. In these cases, you will just need to manually update the filters to exclude that sender.

• Set up a filter to catch email with huge attachments. Jira uses the standard JavaMail library to parse email, and it quickly runs out of memory on large attachments (e.g. > 50 MB given 512 MB heap). As the un-handled mail is not deleted, it will be reprocessed (causing another OutOfMemoryError) each time the mail service runs. Unless you are sure your mail server will not pass a huge attachment on to Jira, it is best to configure a filter to prevent Jira encountering any huge attachments.

• Set up spam filtering rules, so Jira does not have to process (and possibly create issues from) spam.

 

Regards,
Earl