One of my clients had a problem that I suspect is quite common for many Jira administrators. They are using Jira Service Management and have set up an email inbox. When a customer sends an email to the inbox, they are also CC'ing a group of other people about the issue or incident.
Some of those on the CC list are replying to the original email with reply-all, causing another email to be send to their JSM project. Since the reply doesn't include either the Issue Key or the email header that JSM uses to correlate emails to issues, JSM sees this email as a new issue and creates a ticket for it. This can cause a large number of duplicated tickets for the original email if participants are responding to a lengthy email trail that uses the original issue instead of the Jira-generated reply.
We came up with a workaround using Automation 4 Jira that you can see below;
(1) This rule is triggered when a new issue is created.
(2) It uses the following Smart Value to create a new variable called emailSubject.
{{issue.summary.remove("[EXTERNAL]").remove("RE: ").trim()}}
We are removing the words "[EXTERNAL]" and "RE: " as those are added by the email system for replies and for certain emails that are generated by their mail system. This allows us to see
(3) We check to see if there are any existing issues that match the email subject minus the [EXTERNAL] and RE: strings. We restrict it to the last 12 hours so that we aren't accidentally de-duplicating new incidents that happen to use the same subject line.
If we find any matching issues, we transition the new issue to Completed and set the resolution to Duplicated.
(4) Finally, we look for that original issue (there should be only one) and (5) add a comment to it with the body of the email. We may end up with very long comments, but that is ok for now.
This isn't a perfect solution:
However, it should reduce the number of duplicates that need to be reviewed and manually closed as duplicates.
I am interested in whether you have run into this problem and how you solved it. Your comments are welcome
C_ Derek Fields
Atlassian Practice Manager
RightStar
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