Adding issue follower without account by e-mailaddress

[Rembrand van Lakwijk]

We use Jira Service Management to process requests sent to us by customers via our support@ email account. These customers have no accounts; they most probably don't even know about the existance of Jira, nor should they. In most cases Jira works just fine for this situation; all communications with the customer go through email and nowhere in the process do they have to create an account.

Sometimes a customer will send a support request to the wrong email address, e.g. to an employee personally or to info@. Our ideal workflow would then be to just forward the mail to support@ and have everything work as normal.

This works sometimes, however:

• The 'requester' will be set to the person forwarding the mail, in stead of the original sender, or even worse: the requester will be set to our support@ address.
• Sometimes the original sender will end up as a participant, but most of the time not
• Most importantly: once the ticket has been created, there is no way to add the requester/participant to the ticket if they don't already have an account! Through the Jira interface there is no way at all, and in the portal interface, if you type in a random email address, the only option that pops up is to invite them to create an account, which is not at all what we want. We just want them to be added such that they receive e-mail updates as if they had sent the original request to support@ directly.

Supposedly you can add a participant by adding them as a CC when forwarding the ticket, but I have not gotten this to work at all. Not that this would be a great solution, as once you forget to do this, there's no way to fix the situation once the ticket has been created.

[Hamza Chundrigar · Accepted solution]

Hi @Rembrand van Lakwijk 

Depending on the permissions set by your admin, your agents and project admins can add new customers to a project at any time by including their email addresses in the “To” or “Cc” field when replying to a request’s email notification.

To add request participants through email:

• Create a request by drafting an email to your service project’s email address.
• Add the requested participant’s email address to either the “To” or “Cc” fields.
• Send the email request.

We just want them to be added such that they receive e-mail updates as if they had sent the original request to support@ directly.

Depending on what restrictions you've set in your service project — say if a customer sends an email to an employee address instead of the support@ email — Instead of forwarding it, perhaps create/raise a request on behalf of the customer using the content of the email they sent. This way, they'll be the reporter of the original request, and any updates to the ticket should be communicated to the customer via email. This is probably not your ideal workflow. The way Jira Service Management handles forwarded emails is something that has been discussed in the past, so I understand where you're coming from.

Best regards,
Hamza

[Rembrand van Lakwijk]

Hi Hamza,

I did not realize the 'create issue on behalf of' field *does* allow adding an email address that does not have an account associated with it. Even though being able to forward mails would be more ideal, this does solve our issue for now.

Thanks :-)

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Rembrand van Lakwijk ,

in the case of forwarding the email, may we assume that the person forwarding is an agent? I was wondering if the agent could also change the reporter of the issue after it is created.

[Rembrand van Lakwijk]

Yes, they can change the reporter, but Jira does not allow setting the reporter of an issue to an e-mail address that does not have an account associated with it. I have no idea why this limitation exists to be honest, since the 'create issue' screen *does* allow it (see Hamza's answer). This would be a nice feature to have.