Is there a better way to preview .msg email files than show them in plain text?

[Dominik Březina]

This bothers our service desk users a lot, like seriously a lot. We did setup an email channel which our clients use to report incidents, defects, problems and questions; email attachments are used a lot. Emails are rich for pictures and formatting, but Jira preview shows them only in plain text. Our Jira users are really annoyed because they are forced to download attached emails every time they want to see its content.

I checked community and jira.atlassian, but found only these two cases that describe similiar problem:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Better-preview-of-msg-files/td-p/1850230

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/How-to-have-email-attachment-msg-in-HTML-instead-of-TXT/qaq-p/1542909

It´s hard for me to believe there are only two old questions regarding this issue and no suggestion for Jira, cause showing emails only as a plain text makes the preview pretty much useless. Am I missing something? Is there some way to configure views or any workaround to this problem?

I believ I must be missing something, our case cannot be rare.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Jira used to render attached emails, but only ones that were very simply formatted.  To do it, you have to build a rendering function, and as emails have become more complex, and Jira is not an email client, it's been dropped.

Jira expects to work with emails via the email channel and email handlers directly, it's not intended to work with static copies of emails.

On the process side of things, I am curious about this way of working?  Why are you attaching exports of emails to issues?  I know you said they have rich content, but most people who work with emails would work with them in an email client, and if they wanted them in Jira, use the email channels (which convert them to issues, and import all the images as attachments).  I'm not criticising here, it is just a use case I'd like to hear more about.

[Dominik Březina]

Thank you for your answer. It is interesting that your answer is from 15th but I got notified on Friday 17th.

As far as I understand there is nothing I can do right?

Here is one UC to share:

• Client encounters an incident in their system.
• They contact their support.
• Their support tries to resolve this incident.
• Their support figures out the problem is connected with one of our delivered modules.
• Their support creates a ticket by sending e-mail using channels or directly by creating it in client portal.
  • They describe the problem and attach .msg file/s they gathered in communication with their users.
• Our resolution team now has a ticket but needs to download attached emails every time they want see users´ details cause in preview they can see only plain text of .msg files. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I have questioned the delay with the Khoros team.  You should have been mailed inside minutes, and Khoros developers need to know when stuff isn't working the way it should!

Your flow of question to agent makes complete sense.

But I'm a bit stuck on why "add email later" is happening.  When I get told about a problem via email, I forward the email with a comment about "you need to look at this, not me" to a better place than my inbox.

[Dominik Březina]

When client encounters incident he reports it to their service desk. Sometimes it gets forwarded the way you mentioned. "I cannot do nothing about it, so I forward it to provider."

Sometimes it is not obvious and incidents stack at clients problem management team. Then they figure out they cannot do anything about it and they need to contant provider (us). So they open a ticket in our service desk and share all gathered information with us. When it is 1 email, it could be forwarded, but the reson they add it as a attachment is because they want to ask us about it first and keep conversation clear. Forwarding email is a possibility but it makes things messy when disscussion starts and you need to scroll down the email isntead of opening attached file. Sometimes you get ticket with several emails attached to it and forwarding each of them doesnt make much sense cause it would create separete tickets.

[Dominik Březina]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

Greetings,

regarding this case is conslusion that "Attached e-mails are only shown in plain text, this is intented function and there is no way to change it" correct one?

Or should I push this further to Atlassian?

Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That is correct, your people should be emailing the helpdesk directly, not attaching copies of emails.

[Ryan Stille]

Attaching outlook .msg files is a common occurrence for us as well.  Someone might enter a ticket requesting a feature, and attach a supporting email showing the discussion that led up to this feature. Or attach an email from a vendor confirming they can build our cubicles by the date mentioned in the ticket, or whatever. This happens all the time, there are tons of use cases.

[Dominik Březina]

Thanks for joining. I started to wonder if we are only one.

"Someone might enter a ticket requesting a feature, and attach a supporting email showing the discussion that led up to this feature"

Yeah, this UC is also very common for us.

[Jeroen]

We've encountered this issue as well and downloading .msg files to view a customers interaction with other parties involved is very cumbersome.

[Siegfried Schnapka]

We are affected by the same problem. A task often has many mails. Each mail contains more than one illustrated description (screenshot of error effects and explanatory "what did I do and how" text, each dealing with different detailed points on a topic. They move back and forth between the task handler and the responsible persons. And are used / updated in turn on an ongoing basis. They can be seen as self-contained chapters. Writing the information of all mail directly in a TEXT would be confusing and require a lot of effort. Once the work has been completed, each task serves as documentation of the topic worked on. Here it makes sense to have a table of contents and to read only the required "chapters" = mails for each case. Everything else is tedious. How to work: Dividing a task / bug even further into as many subtasks etc. as there are individual points would drive the task handler mad and make the task handler only deal with Jira than with the problem.  The division is epic, story, and deeper is already diverse enough. Therefore: No, I'm not going to open another task for every point "every sentence of a section". Please at least show the graphics of a mail. Text can be read even if it is not formatted 100%. The screenshots are just as important.

[Greg Geary]

Agreed this is functionality available in other competing products such as Zendesk.  Zendesk has a "View Original Email" function which is super useful. 

Currently if an agent receives and email and then the agent forwards to Help Desk the email formatting is lost and it is extremely difficult to decipher the original email. 

Is there not an app on the marketplace at least that can offer this functionality?