JSD email config to allow agents & customers collab but doesn't allow customers to create new reqs

Larry at Isos

I've been asked this question by JSD Cloud customers a couple of times and i've never found a definitive answer to whether it is supported (and if so how it can be configured).

For a "clean/new" JSD project:

Preferred Scenario:

1. Customers can only create requests via the portal (not via email)
2. Only on existing requests can agents and customers collaborate via email
   a. When a new public comment is added by an agent, the customer recieves an email
   b. Customer can reply to that email which adds a comment

If I Turn Off Email requests in the JSD Project, 1, and 2a is satisfied but 2b fails.

My relunctant hack

I've been implementing an Automation based "hack" by doing the following

• Create hidden request type
• Turn On Email Requests and associate emails requests with this hidden request type
• Adding automation to instantly close the issue and comment to the customer that they need to go to the portal
  • have it run as an agent so they get the notifcation
• Notification fix to only acknowledge requests created via the portal
  • Disable the Request created customer notification so email requests don't get a "we're on it" notification 
  • Add an automation to send a "we're on it" notification to request created via the portal (IF request-channel-type != email)

.. but I would prefer a cleaner solution as that's a lot of logic to walk through.

I'd like to be able to enable email comments only on requests created through the portal that wouldn't result in closed requests appearing in the customer's history of request in the portal.

Is there any such configuration? 

Ivan Tovbin

Hi Larry,

An interesting problem you've got there. I'm afraid however that you can't configure JSD mail handler so that it rejects all incoming emails unless they are a part of an already active issue. 

What I would suggest is to modify your solution a bit, to make it cleaner. I can see a couple of options here:

1) Instead of auto-closing issues created via email you can outright delete them, which will prevent your customer's history from being populated by these issues. However this solution requires installing Automation for Jira plugin since standard Jira automation engine can't delete issues. The same plugin can also be used to send emails to your customers, that their ticket "has been deleted, please raise a ticket through customer portal blah blah blah...."

OR

2) Configre your email server in such a way, that all emails that are not part of an active issue (i.e. the ones that DON'T have that issue's key in its subject) are either deleted or moved to another folder (not Inbox) from where JSD simply won't be able to pull these emails.

Other than that, the rest of your solution seems the most logical one and one that I'd come up with myself If I had a similar problem.