Customer mail not received/processed - failure entry in processing log of mail audit

Question

Today I observed that two customer requests sent by mail have not been processed by the mail handler and therefore not visible as an issue. We only realized this because we receive all mail requests via mail forwarding in a separate mail account (just to double check, JIRA did not "oversee" anything).

After intensive checking I found out that this emoticon 😊 used by our customer in his mail let the mail be unprocessable for JIRA. I think this is a critical problem as we want to be sure that JIRA did not "oversee" anything from approved customers.

Does anyone has a technical explanation for this and is there any solution to avoid such a behaviour of the mail handler for the future?

Best wishes from Germany,
Mirko

Mirko Schäfer (Seibert Solutions) · Answer

- SOLVED -

Hi Jack,

Thanks for your quick reply.

The emoticon has indeed been confirmed as cause for the failed email ticket creation. I opened a support ticket and Benz from Atlassian directly found the reason:

We used MySQL as database which is not able to handle 4 bytes characters. We directly have migrated to postgres and now mails containing (4 bytes character) emoticons are being handled correctly.

Regards,
Mirko

Jack Brickey · Answer

This should not be the case. There is a similar discussion here and based upon what i read there I would recommend opening a support ticket if indeed you have confirmed emoticon = failed email ticket creation.