For comment-by-email is it really necessary to create an email account for every JIRA project?

Ben Taratoot

I am going to enable JIRA's ability to let user comment by replying to email notifications. I understand the instructions except this part is strange:

To set up issue and comment creation from email, you will need to create a mail account for a POP or IMAP mail server that JIRA can access – typically, one mail account for each JIRA project. For example, for the 'ABC' project, you might establish an account abc-issues@example.com

Why is creating an email account for every JIRA project the "typical" setup? That seems like a huge administrative burden as opposed to having a single JIRA email account. What are the advantages and disadvantages of a single account vs. multiple accounts as described above?

Alex Christensen

Technically, you shouldn't need to do this for comments by email. We have one mail handler that handles comments by email. There is a default project configured if the mail handler can't find an issue key in the subject line, but you should be able to do this with one mail handler, I believe.

I believe this excerpt is mentioning you should have one per project because you can also handle issue creation via email, as well. To create an issue from an email, you would have to have one email for each project you want to create an issue in.

As an alternative, we set up one mail handler with several different aliases that point back to the same project, then some filtering/labeling rules in the mail handler's email inbox to "triage" the emails to the appropriate folder. Then, in the mail handler configuration, you can have the mail handler look at a particular folder instead of an entire mailbox. That way, you only have one POP/IMAP account configured, then you handle the rest via email aliases and folders.