Can these email-issues be solved by one ore more plugins?

Lise Havnegjerde April 8, 2013

In my company we use Jira as a support tool and most communication with the Customers happens via email and is automatically logged in Jira. We are looking for one or more plugins to solve these requirements:

  • Possibility to include pictures etc. as a part of the text in comments/description – not only to be added as attachments
  • When issues are created or commented by email
    • the email header must show in the comment text (To, From, cc)
    • email signatures/logos should not be stored as attachments
  • Richer text formatting
    • No spaces between lines
    • Tables and illustrations
    • Formatting and colours
    • pictures/screenshots as part of text
  • From an issue - easily be able to generate an email that includes the issue description
  • Remove duplicate mail history from comments

We have looked at the JEMH and the JEditor plugins, but it is is quite difficult to read from the documentation whether one of them (or another) solves our problems. Hope someone in the community give a straight answer!

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Jason Plumhoff
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April 10, 2013

Lise,

Andy pretty well covered it, but for what it's worth - I've been experimenting with using JEMH and JEditor for exactly the same reasons. I was able to produce rich text emails by doing the following:

1) I installed JEditor and replaced the comment renderer with the JEditor renderer.

2) Using JEMH, I built a template set that includes a velocity template that only displays the comments.

3) I set JEMH to send a notification using this template to customers whenever the ISSUE COMMENTED event fires

Now, I can write comments directly in the JIRA tickets using JEditor's rich text editor, and the customer receives them as a fully formatted HTML email. I've also set up some custom events (with associated templates) that fire on various workflow transitions, giving me fine control over when the customer receives certain updates.

From what I've seen so far, using these two plugins together can greatly enhance JIRA as a helpdesk solution.

Jason

Lise Havnegjerde April 16, 2013

Thanks Jason

In our JIRA support project most issues are created via incoming email. Does the JEditor plugin also help us keep HTML formatting from incoming emails?

Anyway, we have decided to install a trial version of the JEditor along with JEMH and JETI. Hope the combination of these three will give us what we need! :)

Lise

Jason Plumhoff
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April 16, 2013
Hi Lise, Unfortunately, no. I believe JEMH is stripping out the HTML, as the normal comment renderer can't display it and JEMH can't assume that Jeditor is installed. But JEMH can store the entire original email or just the email body content as an attachment. On those rare times when I find I need the original formatting on an incoming email, I just copy it out of the attachment, paste it in the comment field, and delete the attachment. Jason
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Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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April 9, 2013

Well, JEMH does a lot, so summarising over your list:

- attachments: JEMH can provide a footer under each comment that includes new images and files. Images are rthumbnailed and linked to the attached image. As yet its not done in-line, this is an open feature request - https://thepluginpeople.atlassian.net/browse/JEMH-1297

- email header: JEMH can do this, see https://thepluginpeople.atlassian.net/wiki/display/JEMH/Customize+the+Comment+Header

- signatures: text can be culled through regular expression matches (Profile > Email > Body Delimiter Regexps). Attachments can be blacklisted by type through the JEMH Profile (course blacklisting), or in the case of attachment logos, uploaded into JEMH where a hash is taken of the file, no file matching that hash will then be ever uploaded again, see https://thepluginpeople.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2850907

- richer text formmating: JEMH has several HTML parsing engines, one includes wiki table formatting. Wiki markup is not HTML and is limited in terms of tables, it is not possible to do many things hence the reduced complexity of HTML->Text. Likewise for pulling out css styles and applying, its very complex. Simple Html tag replacements should be easy enough, a work in progress.

- JEMH has yet to add this feature, but is likely to in the near future. There are other plugins that provide that specific feature (JETI)

- Most mail handlers try to remove included content, JEMH does this too. As there is no specific standard for identifying included/replied to content, the solution JEMH offers is again through the Body Delimiter Regexps, which can be crafted to match your particular environment.

Happy to chat more if needed, just post on http://getsatisfaction.com/thepluginpeople

Andy

Lise Havnegjerde April 16, 2013

Thanks for your answer Andy!

We have decided to install trial version of both the JEMH and JETI plugins and try out the different options, since we believe we will need both to cover all our demands :)

Lise

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