Create user while editing issue reporter?

[Sam Hanes]

My team works on a proprietary application and our customers don't have access to JIRA. We want to track which customer reported an issue with the Reporter field, so we've created users (without the JIRA Users permission) for many of our customers. For the most part it's worked out well. The one major annoyance is that every time a customer reports their first issue whoever is handling it has to ask me to create a user for them. I can't just give everyone administrator access so they can create them on their own.

Ideally I'd like the editor for User Picker fields (including Reporter) to give the option to create a new user when it's submited with an invalid user name. It should allow the user to set the User Name, Full Name and Email but not any permissions. The group and role memberships should be set based on a template configured by the administrator.

It doesn't look like JIRA has any ability for auto-creation of users from a User Picker. It can create users from a mail handler, but that doesn't really help me. If there's a plugin that does this I haven't been able to find it. There also doesn't seem to be any way to grant non-administrators a limited ability to create new users.

Is there an existing solution for this that I'm missing? If not, I guess I'll try to create a plugin to do it.

EDIT 2012-10-08:
Our customers don't interact with JIRA at all. They don't have web access, nor do they exchange email with a JIRA address. We mark them as the Reporter for tracking purposes but they don't get notification mail. The only people who interact with JIRA in any way (or even know it exists) are our development team. We therefore need to be able to create a user for a customer while creating a new ticket or editing an exiting one in the web interface.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

So you dont expect the customer to receive any email notifications at all? Why not just add them as a label, that would work reasonably closely without the need to have 'reporters'. Filters can be used on labels etc.

[Sam Hanes]

Our customers don't send email to JIRA so JEMH doesn't help us at all. We need to be able to set the Reporter through the web interface when creating the ticket. I've updated the question to clarify.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

If your customers interact with JIRA directly why would a mail handler not work?

The default handlers may work for you, or there is more finessing via JEMH,which can do some pretty targetted things like auto create users, auto create groups based on the sender email domain, auto add the sender to that group, auto add that group to a given project role, magic!

Given the limited information available, the account created would tend to be based on email address, with the user name perhaps specified if it were available via email 'Personal'.

I'd be interested to know more if it can't be applied successfuly to your situation?