Is there a way to capture the To: field on incoming service desk requests?

Question

We would like to be able to give out email addresses like:
external-vendor+tommyhilfinger@our_company.com

To our vendors, and have notifications from those email addresses create tickets in a service desk, and then use automation to route them to the right place.

This is better than trying to keep track of the email address that these vendors send from.

Is there any way to capture the "To:" field in the incoming email and use it in an automation rule?

How about using something other than a service desk?

Benjamin Peikes · Answer

No, right now, we have an email handler that pulls from a single mailbox. All issues sent to this mailbox trigger the creation of an regular Jira ticket, (not JSM). Because of the way that Atlassian implemented mail handlers, the issues created are created under one of our Jira user accounts.

One of the reasons we don't use JSM for this, is that it's developers and infrastructure people who handle these notifications. They are not two way discussions with external clients.

In either case, it seems like Jira does not capture anywhere the "To:" field when processing incoming email, which means you can't use "To:" based routing. We can't use "From:" based routing because when we signup with a vendor to receive notifications, we do not know the email address that the emails will be sent from. Vendors can change those emails when ever they want and we would not know.

Joseph Chung Yin · Answer

@Benjamin Peikes -

Are you saying that currently, the issues created in your Jira project based on the incoming emails (vendors) that you default to some common user account?  (i.e. one common user per each vendor).  This means that you are using up an actual Jira Software user license for each vendor.

In JSM implementation, each user (customer) is setup with his/her own account which it is free to submit request into the JSM project.  Only agents from your org (who is handling/processing the issues) will required an actual JSM license.  If you go with the JSM route, then notification is automatically send back to the customer who submitted the case, thus his/her account should always be using his/her email address from his/her company.  You can also configure it to allow users from the same vendor/org to access their issues (i.e. sharing the issues) via the portal UI.  You can use JSM to capture all the issues reported from users within a specific vendor/company via some types of report/data analytic setup.

I am not aware of any third party addon that give you what you are asking for.

Best, Joseph

Benjamin Peikes · Answer

We currently are using a Mail Handler, and creating Jira issues (not JSM), but the issue is, the reporter has to be fixed in a mail handler if the incoming email is not one of out Jira users.

Looking at switching to use a service desk to do this. Yes, in the case of using JSM, the reporter will be an “external vendor”. The issue is that we will not be able to know what the “From” email address will be because the emails will be coming from the vendors mail list system.

The idea is that when we give the vendor an email to get notifications of changes to their system, we want to give them a custom email address in our domain. That would mean we always know which vendor the email is from.

So is it possible? Are there any 3rd party addons?