Issue status does not change to "open" when a non-participant replies

[Jennifer Koper]

When someone other than the Reporter or the Request Participants included in the issue/ticket sends a message on the ticket, the ticket status does not change to "Open." It does not show up as an activity on the ticket, so anyone watching the ticket is not even notified. 

This happens when documents or questions are forwarded to another person in their organization by the Reporter, and then that other person (who is not on the ticket as a participant) then replies to us/Jira directly (which happens fairly often). Even when they use the correct ticket number in the subject line or forward the Reporter's message, the status stays in "Waiting for [reply]" (or whatever status is was in) and does not change to "Open."

This is a real problem because we do not see any indication that the client's company replied, and it can sit for 30 days or more before we check on it. Our clients often need 30-45 days to respond, and we don't have time to check until it has been a while. It's embarrassing to realize that someone replied a month ago, and we didn't know, so we didn't proceed with the next steps. It makes us look bad, and some clients get very upset with this delay.

How can we make any outside reply to the ticket, regardless of who is sending it, change the status to "Open"?