Best practices for Email in Jira

[Clare Lawson]

Hi All.  My IT department prefers that I test emailing in Jira in a sandbox.  At this time, we don't want to use the portal feature, just have emails turn into tickets.  Any best practices out there anyone wants to share?  I would like to just put this in production to test, as I don't see any issues if it's set up in Prod and we just test it internally.  Any thoughts on that?  Thank you!!

[Alexandre Arsenault]

I like "Outlook Email for Jira" add-on in Outlook. 

Works well. 

[Carlos Viscarra]

I always recommend building everything in a sandbox, testing, demo to the business, then move to production. 

This is straight forward. There are two options for email to tickets. One option captures their reporter and the CC fields. The other option does not capture the sender.

[Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_]

Hi @Clare Lawson

In case you use Outlook / Microsoft 365 "Outlook Email forJira" might be a solution for you, thank you @Alexandre Arsenault for pointing that out :-) (please note, I work for yasoon, the app vendor who has built the app).

But if you decide for an app, I'd recommend this one, as you can use the email feature but also Microsoft Teams if you need it later: Microsoft 365 for Jira - Outlook Email, Teams, Meetings | Atlassian Marketplace

(If you have decided whether to integrate the portal, you can also add it to Microsoft Teams as a tab)

Hope that helps, all the best from Germany,

Britta

[John Funk]

Hi Clare,

We set up an email handler in Jira to interact with a custom email address in our Outlook Exchange server. 

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/create-issues-and-comments-from-email/

So when anyone sends an email to that address, it will create a ticket/card/issue automatically for that project. 

[Clare Lawson]

Thank you!

[Chris Thomas]

Email for Jira will do subject, description, reporter and any attachments.

I highly recommend you consider the portal as if you do it correctly, users can sort their own tickets a bit an take pressure off the Helpdesk watching the unassigned queue. In addition the new Forms feature will save the assignee's a lot of time by not having to reach out to the customers if the data they need if it is already in the form.

If you are in a small business (10-50 total employee's) email only should be just fine.

Best practice: If you have another system that sends emails, such as SolarWinds or a server, do not have them go directly to JSM, instead have them go to Opsgenie, then have Opsgenie filter them to JSM. I seriously wished I knew this when I first started JSM.

[Clare Lawson]

Thank you! 

[Johnny FromCanada]

Create a new project in Jira called say “DUMMY”, with permissions restricted to whomever is going to do testing.

Perform test actions on this project, including any that trigger or are triggered by email messages.

Can really help reduce excess email spam and unwanted issue creation.

[Clare Lawson]

Good idea!

[Bill Goetz]

I agree with, @Chris Thomas if you're a smaller business then email is probably ok. If you're testing with an existing inbox, make sure they're all marked as read. Jira will process any unread emails into tickets. Sounds like you may do portals down the road- that's good. It's very difficult to build out automation rules around email requests, that's why portals provide so much more flexibility. Also note: if you use Slack or Teams, you can have users submit tickets this way, instead of email.

[Rafal]

Automations support email sending - might be helpful