Emails to create new ticket landing as a comment to the old/closed tickets

[Prakriti Arora]

Hello,

One of our clients sends emails to create new ticket for one of our projects but those tickets land as a comment to closed tickets, one ticket in particular, very frequent. The client firmly claims that they are composing a new email when creating a ticket but still we are seeing this behavior. Please advise what could be done to correct this?

Thanks.

[Prakriti Arora]

Hello Paul,

Thanks for your suggestion. Would following these steps mess up with anything that's working fine currently? Should I be concerned about anything before making these changes?

[Paul Wiggers]

Well yes, it could be that automations are currently adding comments and those automations could now fail. 
It also means that Closed issues can no longer be reopened and that follow-up questions should be handled in a different issue.

Otherwise, you should be fine. Just make sure to check your automations, communicate it clearly with your team and customers and check the logs regularly to see if anything is failing.

[Prakriti Arora]

That's the automation rule we have in place for this particular project.

[Paul Wiggers]

Well, the good thing is, when an issue is Closed, comments are no longer able to be added. This automation will therefore not run on Closed issues.

Comments made by "not a request participant", will still be added to the issue but won't be recognized as a comment and therefore, not trigger the automation. 

[Prakriti Arora]

So, we shouldn't really see anything strange happening with the changes you have suggested?

[Paul Wiggers]

I cannot promise that. With the information that I have, it looks like there will be no issues, but you have to decide if you want to take that risk with your production environment.

If you are unsure about the effect a change might have, please create a sandbox environment to test it out. 

Testing something in production that you are unsure of, or cannot revert quickly, will eventually lead to issues. 

[Paul Wiggers]

The e-mail handler checks if the subject contains an existing issue key. If so, it will try to attach the e-mail as a comment on that issue.

If the customer composes a new message but uses the old issue key in its subject then that e-mail will show up as a new comment. 

Also, what I have noticed is that reporters, that are not part of the request, can send replies to an issue but they won't trigger anything within Jira. Those comments will show up as "not a request participant" after the participant's name.

If you want to stop clients from commenting on a closed issue, then you have to change the permissions. You can do that through the workflow. Select the status that you want to change and select Properties. Make sure you add these properties.

That way, when a customer replies to a closed issue, a new issue will be created. Just make sure that people tagged as "Not a request participant" can still reply to this issue and it won't trigger the creation of a new ticket. 

Is this something you can work with?