What is the best solution to start an email thread thru Jira with an Jira issue 'reporter' who does not have a Jira account?

Question

This is what we are trying to accomplish .....

We will eventually have to support 100's of customers. We want these customers to be able to enter issues into our Jira instance, without giving them Jira accounts. We would like all communication between us and our customers related to product iissues to be exclusively handled by email, generated by Jira.

We have implemented the solution to create a Jira issue from a customer's email, as described in  http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Creating+Issues+and+Comments+from+Email , using the class com.atlassian.jira.service.services.imap.ImapService, with the 'Create or Comment' handler and the handler parameters 'project=BC,issuetype=1,reporterusername=maarten', where 'maarten' has a Jira account. This works perfectly.

The issue we are running into is that we want to automatically notify the customer by email what the Jira issue # is, as well as provide an update by email when the issue reaches certain states. We do not know how to get a handle on the customers email, as the only place we can find it is in the issue description field i.e. [Created via e-mail received from: John Paulson <jpaulson@yahoo.com>]

We were initially thinking about editing the issue and replace the 'Reporter' value of 'maarten' with 'jpaulson@yahoo.com>'. It seems that the UI does not allow us to do so and even if it did, I do not know if this is a viable solution. Are there any alternative solutions? Or are we perhaps trying to implement a solution that makes no sense?

Obviously one solution is to upgrade to an unlimited Jira license and to create a user account for each of our customers. I would rather avoid doing this because of the potential logistical nightmare of having to support that many accounts, not to mention the license fee involved.

I really appreciate any suggestions / tips that anybody might have.

Thank you,

Maarten

unknown · Answer

JEMH https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/wiki/display/JEMH (a JIRA email handler) allows the original senders email address to be be directed to a specific custom field.  It gets a little more interesting when you also want to collect included participants that arent JIRA user account related, JEMH can also collect those and update a text CF with CSV email addresses.  You'll need to do something with that information.

> The issue we are running into is that we want to automatically notify the customer by email what the Jira issue # is

Well, JEMH has a specific feature for JEMH to generate emails using the issue created template, and return that to the sender. Failing that, there is also the ability to auto-create a user that _does not_ have right to use Jira, therefore doesnt eat seats, I think they can participate in notification scheme events but this is potentially confusing as they cannot login.

An evolvement in user creation with JIRA 4.4 is that they are now automatically joined to a seat-eating group.  JEMH is un-registering users in that case.

Radu Dumitriu · Answer

An idea, never tried it, but you can set up multiple inboxes (one for each of your customers/projects) and use handler's catchemail and reporter username params to direct the mail to the appropriate jira issue creation. Customer will not have any account at all (so that reporter param will kick in). Of course, you will end up with one inbox alias for each project.