Getting duplicate email notifications

Tony Mazzarino September 15, 2017

Our JIRA Project is connected to a sevice mailbox account, so whenever a user emails the service account a JIRA ticket automatically created.

With the expection that all subequent communication via email is then "handed off" and appears as new comments on the original ticket.

This works fine when the user replies to the Jira ticket message email directly.

However, if the original send or another user who has been CC'd replies to the email directly and not the Jira ticket response email, the subsequently a new Jira Ticket (duplicate) gets created.

There is a field in the email header called "reply-to-message" or something like this, and that should be used to link the email back to the jira but that isn't working properly for some reason. Please advise.

Kind Regards

Tony

4 answers

0 votes
Tony Mazzarino September 21, 2017

Thanks Andy, perhaps the issue is related to Office 365?

Regards

Tony

Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 25, 2017

Hi Tony,

Sorry for the delay.  I think this certainly could be a problem with the SMTP server in use in your case. But there are a few different possible factors here that make it difficult to troubleshoot this.

In order to try to help troubleshoot this issue further, I was trying to see if I could create a support ticket on your behalf on our https://getsupport.atlassian.com site.  However, I can't seem to do this since either you do not have an account on this site yet, or you have never created a ticket there.   Since your team is obviously using our Cloud offerings, I would expect that you should be able to open a request there provided you know the URL for your Cloud site.

As such I would recommend trying to create this request yourself, or have one of your teammates that does have access there create a support request there

Tony Mazzarino September 25, 2017

Thanks Andrew, I've raised a ticket as requested, please find link below:

https://getsupport.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/35/CA-332445

0 votes
Tony Mazzarino September 19, 2017

Thanks again for your reply. We are using JIRA Cloud with the native service desk mail handler. 

Regards

Tony

Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 20, 2017

Hi Tony,

Thanks for that information.  I tried to recreate this problem in my own test Cloud instance.  I created an email with both the JSD mail address and another email in the To field.

I then used that 2nd account to do a reply all.   I found that in my case Service Desk didn't create a new issue for this Reply All.  Instead it just added that reply as a comment to the issue.

In my case I used the Cloud email address of support@example.atlassian.net

Are you using a custom email address in your situation?

I also used Gmail in my test for both the send and the reply.  Not sure if that makes a difference here, but I think we need more information here in order to try to determine why you might be seeing a different behavior.

0 votes
Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 19, 2017

Hi Tony,

There are a lot of similar cases you listed there, but each of these is dealing with a different product or platform.   So to help clarify, I think we need some more information about which aspects we are talking about here.

Service Desk handles mail in a different way than the Core/Software mail handler does.  Also, it's possible that Server vs Cloud versions could be handling this differently through different specific versions.

I am curious to learn more about:

  1. what specific version of JIRA you are using,
  2. whether this is Jira cloud (hosted by Atlassian) or a Jira server instance, and
  3. if this is a service desk mail handler or Core mail handler

Once we understand that, then I think we can start to dig into the specific steps needed to reproduce this problem and then we can start to work out the expected behavior vs actual behavior here.

0 votes
Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 18, 2017

When Jira processes a new received email, it can only post a comment to an existing issue if the subject line matches (both issue key and summary).  But when Jira gets a new subject line that does not contain an existing issue key yet, the default response is instead to create a new issue, assign it an issue key, and then send out notifications that include the previous subject line, but this time it is prefixed with the issue key.

Since the first message doesn't yet have a Jira issue key, an email user replying directly to that first email message won't have an issue key either.  So the logic of the email processor in Jira at this time is not smart enough to foresee this.

Since you could easily have multiple issues in Jira with the same subject/summary from different users, the behavior in this case shouldn't actually be to merge these together.   You could conceivably have two different users create two separate support requests with the exact same subject/summary.  To merge those requests would not be a desirable behavior here either.

I wasn't able to find any such email header with the term "reply-to-message".  But in order for that or something like it to work, this email header field would have to be both unique to the first message, and then stay consistent among all the replies generated from this first message in order for this to work the way I think you are looking for here.   To the best of my knowledge I don't think there is such an email header that exists, as such I believe this is why Jira is then always including the issue key in the subject line.

Tony Mazzarino September 19, 2017

Thanks Andy for your comprehensive reply.

Sorry, email header term is actually "in-reply-to id".

Essentially the expection is more accurately described via the below links, which suggest it was a known issue that should have been resolved?

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-30293

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-4058

Regards

Tony

Tony Mazzarino September 19, 2017

Also find below a third reference to the issue:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-2334

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