JSD is creating a new ticket for each email response

[Gary Rafter]

Hi,

I am looking for some assistance with an issue I have with JSD,  we have been using JSD for the past 8 months without any issue but recently when the customers from one particular company responds on JSD tickets (via email) it is creating a new ticket for each reply instead of appending it to the existing ticket.

This was working up to about 3 weeks ago and this is not happening for customers from other companies using the same JSD project.

When I searched the Atlassian community forum I saw some articles which essentially said if the subjects contains the key for the ticket then it should add the reply as a comment to that ticket but in my case the Key is in the subject, here is an example '[JIRA] (CSUP-644) RE: [JIRA] [CSUP-610] Issues for the channel subscribe notification'.  So as you can see the customer responded to the ticket CSUP-610 but instead of appending it to that ticket in JSD it created a new ticket, CSUP644.

Would anyone have any suggestions as to what might be happening here? Maybe someone else has encountered this issue and managed to resolved it? I was thinking maybe the company might have changed something recently in their email setup??

We are using JIRA v7.3 and Service desk v3.4 Server version.

Any assistance with this would be appreciated?

Thanks

[Andy Heinzer]

In this version of Service Desk, the only users that can add public comments to an existing JSD issue are the Assignee (Agent), the reporter, or members added to the request participant fields before the email is processed by Jira Service Desk. 

As a result, if you forwarded an email with that subject to a new user, and that user then replied to the email address the JSD is using, they can only comment if they had rights to comment on that issue via the customer portal.  

The next version of Service Desk, 3.5, they introduced a new feature to allow even users without access to at least leave a comment: https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedesk/jira-service-desk-3-5-x-release-notes-894738991.html

Non-customer comments

In previous versions of JIRA Service Desk, when a person who was not already a customer or participant on a request replied to an email related to an existing request within that service desk, that reply would create a new request. This could be confusing for both the customer and the agents involved in the request.

We've now added an option on the Email requests page which allows the service desk admin to decide if they want to allow non-participants and external people to comment on existing requests via email. When enabled, and if your service desk allows public sign-up, we'll add the comment and create a customer account for the email sender. If public sign-up is disabled, we'll disregard the email.

In that version of Service Desk and higher, the user still doesn't have access to the request, but their comment can still be added.

In all versions, if you want the user to be able to see this issue and comment to it, then that user should be added to the request participants before they attempt to send a message to that address with that subject.

[Gary Rafter]

What was said in the 'Non-customer comments' makes sense as after further investigation with the customer that this issue was happening with,  it turns out that around the time this started they had gone through a rebranding of their company and had just changed all of their email addresses from @xxxxxxx.com to @yyyyyyy.com,  so their new emails were not available in our JIRA right after this point in time. 

What led us to figure out what was happening was that any new issues that were created from when they changed over emails were working fine and the issue was only happening on existing tickets prior to their change over.  

As we are dealing with a small number of tickets we decided to do nothing here as the issue will flush itself out over time.

Thanks for the response on this.

[Andy Heinzer]

Ah, thanks for clarifying Gary, I hadn't considered a mass change to an email domain as being a source cause for this, but yes, that too could cause problems here since Jira is only able to identify email senders based on the content of the message and compare that against the email field in the user account Jira maintains for that user.

[Eric Newton]

Just running into this myself through google search since we see same problem.

Customer hasn't changed email addresses, but anytime I reply back directly to customer and cc/to the JSD email, a new issue keeps being created...

Could the software put a header into the mail message to coordinate the commenting better?  Like X-Issue-Id: CSUP-610 so when it sees that header on a reply, it's "more inclined" to append the response to the correct issue, when the email address algorithm fails to match?

[Florian Koelling]

Hi all, I am currently having the same issues, what would be the best possible solution to avoid duplicate tickets without having to allow public sign-up? Is there a way to integrate responses from not-registered users via email in the comment thread, or to prevent tickets from being generated in case someone is simply replying to an email which adressed the service desk email adress?

Kind regards,

Florian