Preventing the attachment of duplicate images from emails to the issue screen in JSM

[#1]

Hello Community,

My name is Manpreet, and I’m a Product Manager for JSM Cloud.

Today, I am thrilled to announce an enhanced experience in how Jira Service Management handles images received via email.

We’ve observed that many a time repeated emails contain assets such as the company logo, social media icons of the company in the sender's signature. These images in ongoing communication between help seekers and agents via email causes clutter on ‘Attachments’ section, making it difficult for assignee to find relevant files for issue resolution. This is how the Attachments section looks like after few conversations on the ticket:

What's been Improved?

The overwhelming amount of redundant attachments motivated us to create a filtering systems to prevent repeated images get attached in issue screen and maintain a clean and organized workspace within JSM.

With the improvement, any image received via email and is a duplicate in an issue will not populate in 'Attachments' section again. To avoid any data loss, the image will remain a part of the comments. If i take the above example again, the image will be attached only once as shown below:

Another scenario where this enhancement proves beneficial is when JSM employs connections with third-party software or marketplace applications. We've noticed that duplicated images are also transferred to these integrated systems (such as Microsoft Teams), which slows down their operation and causes significant frustration. With the proposed solution, the influx of duplicated images to the integrated systems will be prevented, thus increasing their efficiency.

Release Update

We have initiated the deployment of this functionality, and it is expected to be accessible for all JSM Cloud users by October 12th, 2023.

[Cosmo Denger]

YES!!  Thank you and sooner than expected!

[Derek Fields _RightStar_]

How do you know if an image is a duplicate? I assume it is purely based on the filename - can you confirm?

[Mike Curwen]

It's hash-based, thankfully.   https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-6037?focusedId=3322397&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-3322397

[Manpreet Singh]

Hi @Derek Fields _RightStar_, we are not using filename to check for duplicates but instead hash value to determine if an image is identical. 

[Derek Fields _RightStar_]

Excellent - thanks.

[Constantin Lotz]

Very nice, if we now can also Blacklist some images via md5 or sth. to General prevent Signatur images in isses would be great.

[Debbie Radulescu]

Finally :)

[ismail içka]

I'm not crying about this announcement. I just got dust in my eyes. <3

[Kenneth Muñoz]

Hi

Is this improvement already released in production and Jira Service Management?
How can I access the new improvement?

[Manpreet Singh]

Hi Kenneth,

Happy to announce that we have released this improvement to everyone and is available to all by default. One pre-requisite to have this improvement is that HTML email parsing must be enabled (<tenant>/jira/settings/products/jira-service-management-email-requests).

If you are not able to view the improvements, reach out to me at msingh10@atlassian.com and we will look into the same.

Cheers!

[mb]

Hi! Is there any plans to implement this to all mail handlers instead of only Jira Service Management? Thanks!

Also, an MD5 hash blacklist for known logos and a minimum file size threshold would be nice.

Best Regards

[Jonathon Choy]

Email trails forwarded still appear to get inserted, using the signature detection manages to remove the initial instance, but any follow-on emails in the trail will display. Typically, this occurs when an email is forwarded to the Service Desk project and there is often a repeat of signature code, images and the like throughout. Having a special code or phrase to identify when this is marked as a signature seems to work most successfully from a new email not one that has been forwarded. In this case it marks a signature of the initial email in the trail but not considering and subsequent ones.

Additionally the first comment generally is all of the images collected in one pass, but without the context of the email content

Several attempts at testing and rectifying have proven fruitless thus far. Hoping for further updates

[Jason Selby]

This is still not fixed. Who can I speak to about this?

[Pierre BOUCHERIE]

Hi,

Well, I'm glad to hear you're making improvement but the way my organisation is using Jira SM, we don't actually need images from the body of the emails to be listed in the attachements section at all, it's just polluting it with social media apps icon and other corporate signatures.

I understand that some other company might want them in the attachments list, but then can't you just provide an option that, when activated, would simply ignore images in email body ? (they would just be displayed in the description field and if we'd need it in the attachment section, that is one image on one thousand, we would manually add it)

Best regards

[Anna Badasian]

Hi,

this is not working for us, i am getting all the attachments form the email signatures again and again. Even though the HTML email parsing is enabled.

Any ideas for workaround maybe?

Best regards