replying to cases created by email from external user

Igor Belagoruds

Hi,

I've read through many answers, but can't seem to find exactly what I am looking for. If I missed it, please feel free to point me to an answered thread already.

We are switching from FogBugz and there we had an option to get cases via email from external users. They were marked as the correspondent on the case, but a user account was not created. We were also able to reply their email right from the case and it would add the reply as a comment on the case.

So I need the following fuctionality:

1. Be able to create cases from incoming emails. I created an inbox and a handler and that works except I am stuck at the decision to auto create users. I tried to set the autocreation to false and to set the default reporter, but that seems like half a solution - I would rather not have a reporter at all or maybe have a virtual user called Incoming Mail. I also tried to follow some of the suggestions about creating users but adding them to the nonjira users scheme so they can't log in and don't count toward our limit - that sounds like a real solution except I can't figure out how to automate it and I don't see the role I need in the list of roles.

2. Be able to respond to the submitter via email from the case. This seems so trivial that I wonder if I am just missing it, but I've looked everywhere. I think I have all the permissions...

3. Along the same line, I am a little confused about the watchers functionality. When an external submitter emails in a case, I would like to have them be notified if that case is closed or when we explicitly reply via email (#2 above) but I don't want them to be notified about every comment we may add to the case. Is that possible?

Any help at all would be very appreciated!

Thanks,

Igor

EDIT: added some more tags

unknown

#1, if your volume is low you can pre-create the users and use the default mail handler, then the remote users will be able (if you've set permissions accordingly) to create issues in the target project by email, and receive comments. By default, they will receive whatever notifications are associated with the 'reporter' in the Notification Scheme. Howevber, if you're remote user base is large, and/or you dont want potentially hundred of accounts created at all (even if they arent seat consumers) then JEMH would help by allowing non-jira (non Account holder) issue creation. Sender email addresses and other non-JIRA participants are stored in a CustomField. The interesting part is that by doing this, the non-JIRA users can then be notified through the JEMH IssueListener, with tailored notifications that are differnet that the JIRA notification scheme.

#2 Hmm, the simple case is to just comment, however, notifying the sender is really currently done by either JETI or some kind of custom event triggering action, that something like JEMH can then react to and issue notifications.

#3 Watchers need to be JIRA account holders, whether they are full 'jira-users' or not. So, if in #1, you are creating users, they can be made to autowatch (this is the case I think for reporter but I'm not sure if default mail handlers do that for all participants, JEMH does).

I had a recent case whereby all JIRA commenting and so on when to the JEMH IssueListener, but did not cause notification to non-JIRA user. The customer concerned had a UI button to take a comment, and fire a custom event, which the IssueListener did react to and trigger a notification. The exact details of this I dont have to hand but could look up.