Auto-replies from request participants are not sent to Service Desk

[Susan Ostreicher]

We recently moved a support desk from a shared mailbox to JSD.  In the past, support agents would sometimes ask for input from non-agents by simply forwarding them the email.  Now we're handling this by adding the non-agent as a request participant. 

The problem is that when a request participant is out of the office, their auto-reply is not sent to JIRA.  The reply-to address in the JIRA notification is fine, but our admin explained to me that JIRA uses a different return-path that prevents auto-replies from being sent.  This is impacting our response time, because the question might go unanswered for hours or days until we finally follow up with the request participant via email and find out they're on vacation.  

Has anyone found a workaround for this issue?  Can the return-path be changed, either for free or by using an email handler plugin?  

Thanks for your help!

[Susan Ostreicher]

In case anyone else runs into the same question, I contacted Atlassian Support and learned that: 

• Unfortunately, we cannot modify the return path. The JIRA notifications are being sent externally by Sendgrid.
• Per this post on a Gmail forum, vacation responses must be sent to the return-path: Canned Reponses Replying to Return-Path rather than From-Path

So it seems there's not a solution that would let JIRA receive vacation responses from anyone involved in the ticket (reporters, participants, or agents). 

[Monique vdB]

Thanks for following up on this @Susan Ostreicher!