JIRA Mail Handler finicky about some unknown users

Question

I am using JIRA Cloud and recently set up a Mail Handler to Create Issues and Add Comments to Existing Issues. I've asked our first internal customer to submit an email and it was rejected. I asked another to submit one and it went through. I also have a SharePoint form that submits an email to the mail handler account with a noreply@ address and that went through.

The Handler is configured to not create users when an email comes in from an unidentified email address. I have set the default reporter to be me. I noticed that the reject email said that it rejected the 1st person because they do not have permission to create issues. I visited my permission scheme and added Reporter to see if it would help which it did not. The specific error is : "Reporter (jane.smith) does not have permission to create an issue. Message rejected.". She submitted her emails three times with different text and subject in each. We are using Outlook as a client... she tried both Desktop and Web-based clients.

Any ideas?

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Ah, if this user has an account under that email address in JIRA, and that account does not have permissions to create issues there, that could explain why JIRA is throwing this as a permissions failure.   Whereas other user accounts that do not have an email address in this JIRA instance would not exist at all here.

Yes, inactive users are not going to appear within the Permission Helper utility.   Since JIRA is throwing this specific error message, it's a pretty clear indication that this JIRA instance does have that username with her email address tied to it.   If this account is inactive, I think one way around this problem would be to change the email address for this inactive account to some other value if possible.

Deleting the user account is another way around this, but that method has other implications from a historical data integrity aspect that might not be an ideal path forward.  That is better explained in Creating, editing, and deleting users. If the user has no comments, reported issues, assigments, etc, then deleting them from JIRA should be fine, but if they do, then you really don't want to delete the account in most cases.

Peter Capazzi · Answer

Thanks for the feedback. I am the default reporter and I do have permissions to create both issues and comments.

It would seem that 'jane.smith' is getting stuck as the reporter and does not have permissions. Can she exist as a user and not show up in lookups if her account is disabled perhaps? I do not have permissions to manage or view user lists. However, using your suggestion I do not find her in the JIRA Permissions Helper. I'm curious if she used to have an account is currently disabled/inactive. Are disabled/inactive accounts filtered from user lookups such as that in the Permission Helper?

Andy Heinzer · Answer

When you are not permitting new users to be created in the mail handler, and you're using the default reporter option, the JIRA issues themselve are going to attempt to be created under whatever account rights/privledges exist for that default reporter account.  (provided the user account does not exist in JIRA already) Hence if your account cannot create issues in that project and you used your account as the default reporter, then neither can that mail handler create those issues.

This is also explained in Creating issues and comments from email.

When the second user did this, and it worked, who appears as the reporter of that issue?   Is it that user, or did it pick the default reporter account (you)?

It might be interesting to look closer at the permission scheme to make sure that your account is granted access under the "Create Issue" and "Add Comment" permissions section of the permission scheme for that project.   Typically we would recommend this be done by adding yourself to a project role, rather than explicitly adding your account, but one way or the other we would want to make sure your account has the needed permissions to perform this action.

I would also recommend trying to use the JIRA Admin Helper in order to determine if your account has the right settings.   Even if you do not have the needed settings, that tool can quickly take you to the pages where you can change this if you have rights to do so.