Jira doesn't create a separate ticket

Question

Hi,

I have experienced that Jira doesn't create a separate ticket when technically it should've.
Our co-worker sent a ticket to our team with different but similar topics and they all combined into one ticket.

An example in our case:

Żądania usunięcia danych - User 1 (and email address) - first email

Żądania usunięcia danych - (User 2) - second separate email

I've used user 1 and 2 on purpose because those are names of the clients.

And from what I've noticed is that it only checked those 3 words and merged it to one ticket. Why is it happening like that, it is kinda obvious that those are 2 different tickets.

Andrea Rákosfalvy _META-INF_ · Answer

Hi @Michał Cichecki

Welcome to the community!

I think what you are experiencing is what is described in the following article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/the-jira-or-service-management-mail-handler-added-a-comment-to-an-existing-ticket-instead-of-creating-a-new-ticket-from-an-email-1115156264.html

The important part to note is whether the sender of the email actually created a new email (clicked new email on their mail client), or repurposed an existing one by hitting reply on an existing email and then changing the subject of it and deleting the original content thinking it is the same as a new email.

When the sender repurposes an existing email, the original email's message ID gets added to the References message header of the email that is sent out - Jira uses these headers to identify emails that belong to the same email thread, thus should be in the same issue.

In the Email This Issue app, we also provide the option to use message header references as part of the issue lookup rules in the mail handler, leading to similar confusion. (disclosure: I work for META-INF and provide Email This Issue support).

What we use for checking if the association is indeed based on the message IDs is that we check the message header in the mailbox for both emails and see if the "Message-ID" header (or any message IDs from the "References" header) of the original message are a match to any message ID's in the "References" header of the second email - this is all outlined in the article I included above.

Based on the article's conclusions, it doesn't look like there is an option to turn this lookup off in the mail handler. The Email This Issue application does provide this kind of search as optional, so you would be able to use issue-key-based lookup only if you wish to give it a try. I recommend user education though, especially since these emails are from a co-worker.

I hope this helps.

Andrea
META-INF support

Mara (bitvoodoo ag) · Answer

Hi @Michał Cichecki

Welcome to the Community & thanks for your question!

This behaviour seems odd indeed. To make sure I understand correctly: Two separate tickets are created (via mail or portal) but in the system, they end up as the same issue (for example ABC-1).

After creating a ticket, the system usually sends a confirmation notification with the name of the issue. Is it "ABC-1" on both?

Best wishes,
Mara