Quickfix ☝🤓 – Solve Duplicate Tickets from Email Replies with Customer Organizations

[#1]

Seeing dupicate tickets in JSM from email replies all over the community (here, here, here, here, ..) I decided to write an actionable article to get this fixed quickly.

Problem 😨

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Summary

• You have received an email from a customer (or they used your service portal).

• A different person replies to the ticket emails (or the customer uses a different e-mail address).

• Instead of commenting on the existing ticket, a new ticket was created.

Details

Jira ingests emails in five stages, during which problems like a duplicate ticket from an email can occur:

• (1) Sending the email > (2) Email Inbox > (3) Jira Mail Handler > (4) Matching the Ticket > (5) Permissions

Jira will not recognize emails from another email address as valid comments, since ..

• .. the email address differs from that of the original customer ( => different customer ) and

• .. no one other than the original customer is allowed to see or interact with the original customer's tickets (without further setup)

Will this work for you? 🤔

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• You are using Jira Service Management

• The email addesses replying to your tickets are known and you have a relatively stable list (e.g. your customer is an organization)

• Will not work if ..

  • email addresses change frequently (e.g. many individual clients)

  • There are issues with the other stages

Solution 💪

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1. Create an Organization for all customers that belong together

2. Add all customers to that Organization

Add all email addresses of the customers who are part of that organization. By doing this, they will be moved from 'general customers' to 'customers specific to that organization'.

3. Organization Settings

Your JIRA admin must ensure the global setting 'Request Sharing' is enabled for your organization:

• Global settings (check under this URL):
  https://<YOUR_INSTANCE>.atlassian.net/secure/admin/SDConfiguration.jspa

• Project settings (just fyi, no check needed):
  https://<YOUR_INSTANCE>.atlassian.net/jira/servicedesk/projects/<YOURPROJECT>/settings/customer-permissions

4. Fixed!

New issues created by organization-registered email addresses will now be tagged as such in a dedicated field. Other email addresses registered with the same Organization are now allowed to comment under these issues.

Additionally, if an email has other organization members on CC these are added as request participants, so they will receive notifications regarding that ticket. This does however not apply to people on CC, which are not part of the ticket's organization.

5. Update old tickets if needed

Responding to existing tickets (before Organizations were set up) will however still create a new ticket and not a comment. In order to fix this, you will need to assign them to Organizations in the issue sidebar manually.

You've crossed the finishing line 🏆🥳

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Hope this small article helped fix your emailing problem. I'd love to hear if yes or no and also if any particular step caused trouble or can be improved. 🙂

Still doesn’t work for you? 😩

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In case this Quickfix did NOT work out, feel free to take a look at Duplicate AI (our app on the marketplace).

It’s an all in one tool all around duplicate issues: automatically find duplicates / similar tickets & merge issues with a few clicks.

– Cheers, Markus / Secretbakery.io

[Mariano]

Thank you @mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_ for this detailed and quite useful explanation! This is the kind of help that makes this community amazing.

Seriously, thanks a lot for putting your time into helping us.!  I will definitely try this tonight on my SD project.

Offtopic question: What did you use to do the small animated clip for the Add customers part?

[mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_]

Thanks @Mariano, I really appreciate your kind words. Let's me know I built something meaningful for the community. :)

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For the animations I use https://www.screentogif.com/. It's 100% free and much better than all the paid stuff I have tried! :)

[Mariano]

@mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_ thanks yet again, I will definitely try screentogif.com during the weekend!

I'm glad my apprecation shows, it's very well deserved! :) I wish you a nice weekend, cheers! 

--Mariano

[Supakij Ngamwongpaiboon]

Hi Markus,

Great work around, but I am curious if you know if there is an option for this scenario:

• email addresses change frequently (e.g. many individual clients)

The issue I'm having is that the client has hundreds of users that would be pulled into emails that contain the alias. That makes maintaining an organization list fairly difficult in this regard. Looking forward to your response!

Thanks!

Supak

[mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_]

@Supakij Ngamwongpaiboon, let me see if I understand: Your client has hundred of users and you need to sync them. Which one of those is your problem at hand?

1. You don't have a data source for all of of the email addresses.
2. The email addresses change frequently.
3. You don't know how to automate the syncronization of emailadresses to JIRA.

[Supakij Ngamwongpaiboon]

@mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_ - scenario #1 and (I believe) #3

[mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_]

@Supakij Ngamwongpaiboon I believe this is only possible as a custom solution (fingers already itching to write code ;)).

You can also try to automate organization building from tickets - I have 0 experience, so not sure if possible, but my thoughts are:

• Manually create an Organization for your customer's TLD (e.g. microsoft.com)
• Automation
  • Trigger: New Ticket
  • Get the domain of the reporter's email address (e.g. for bill@microsoft.com => "microsoft.com")
  • Add bill@microsoft.com to the Customer Organization "microsoft.com".

[Keith Jones]

@Supakij Ngamwongpaiboon Quick question on this - are all users in the new Org now able to see *all* shared issues in the JSM portal? Or do they only see issues in which they are marked as Request Participants? 

[Supakij Ngamwongpaiboon]

@Keith Jones - This we haven't gone live with, so the only members that have access are our internal team, so I'm not sure what clients would be able to see. I'm curious if there's an impersonate mode to test this 

[daniel.lorenzo]

Thanks for yor guide @mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_ ! Still didn't test it but most probably we will in the incoming week!

[mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_]

@Keith Jones , @Supakij Ngamwongpaiboon : You can enable / disable the sharing across the whole organization in the settings:

-- Disable automatic sharing of tickets --

In this case:

• Customers in the same Organization cannot see the other customers' tickets
• Only if a customer put's another customer on CC: That customer will be added as request participant + he will be able to see the ticket details

[mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_]

@daniel.lorenzo thanks, let us know how it goes. Would be great if you share any pitfalls.

[Susana Domínguez]

@mararn1618 _secretbakery_io_ : If I choose this option, by default the "Share with" drop-down will have the "No one" value..but, if the customer decides to select "the Organization" the issue will be sent to all customers from the organization.

This field is mandatory! How can we avoid this behavior? We do not want that the rest of the employees receive/see the other users' issues..

thank you!!

Susana