Receiving "on leave" responses in JSM how are people managing these?

Question

Hi all, would love advice on this, sometimes when our agents go on leave and they are assigned a message or automation emailed. Their auto responses via outlook come back as customer comments.

I think Atlassian has a system in place already, so I'm not sure if my set up has something incorrect that they are coming through.

Thanks for your help!

Marc -Devoteam- · Accepted Answer

Hi @Calvin

Are you agents also listed as customers and/or do they have the role Service Desk Customer?

Make sure they are not listed as customer.

Also check the automation rule (if setup) based on trigger "work item commented". Is this rule active and what does it do with comments?

Check this KB, https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/how-does-jira-service-management-process-email-requests/#Email-processor

Gabriela - LeanZero · Accepted Answer

Hi @Calvin, your read is right, JSM does try to catch these. The email processor drops anything whose headers carry Auto-Submitted set to anything other than 'no' (auto-generated, auto-replied, auto-notified) or Precedence: bulk, which filters most OOO replies before they ever become a comment.

Outlook ones slip through because of a known Exchange behaviour. It isn't something you've set up wrong. Exchange shows the Auto-Submitted header in the Outlook UI but doesn't pass it to external apps polling the mailbox, so JSM receives what looks like an ordinary reply and processes it. Atlassian documents this exact case (https://support.atlassian.com/jira/kb/jira-service-management-not-rejecting-or-filtering-automatic-reply-emails-from-certain-users/) and their stance is there's no fix inside Jira; it has to be handled on the mail server, with your Exchange admin making sure that header gets stamped on outbound OOO messages.

On the JSM side your one real lever is the blocklist. Go to Space settings > Channels & self service > Email > More actions > Manage blocklist and add the agent's address, or their whole domain. It drops everything from that sender though, so only use it where the agent never emails the channel directly.

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Accepted Answer

Hello @Calvin

There's really no official solution for that.

Your Admin should Start by checking the raw headers of an incoming OOO email in your JSM mailbox to see what's actually reaching Jira, then address it at the Exchange layer.

Thats related to this both [JSDCLOUD-17846] Allow JSM Mail Handler to process header "X-Auto-Response-Suppress: All" - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.,

[JSDCLOUD-8983] Sometimes Jira service desk process an auto-reply email successfully instead of Rejecting it, even when there is no allow list is in place - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

Best,

Arek🤠