How to configure jira's email handler to route unrecognized emails to a specific mailbox

[Scott Blanchard]

We recently encountered a situation where an important email reply from a customer was missed. What had happened is that the sender (me) did not check the "Reply to me" box in the hidden "email options" field

(sidebar: why is this view not default or optioned to be default? - but I digress...)

As a result, the receiver's reply message, which contained important information did not get to the sender (again, me - the dummy who is among the great unwashed in the ways of the all powerful Jira).

The email recipient, having not received a response to his jira bound message in a reasonable time, began the painful process of escalation that included the minimum required CC'd executives so as to create the necessary urgency to insure prompt attention to the issue.

You get the point. This really happened exactly as described.

So, my question is: How do we configure Jira's inbound mail handler so that when it receives a message from a user it does not recognize, it can route the email to one of the following mailboxes:

1. Best - the person who originally sent the email ("Hey dummy, heads up, you might want to take a look at this email")
   
   
2. Better than getting fired over missed emails- a user defined email address where lost messages are routed. I do understand that there is a log file that may contain these messages and I'm looking to avoid having to go there.

[richie_gee · Accepted solution]

Hi Scott,

Sorry to hear about your issue, I feel your pain man...

But you can actually configure the forward email address to forward emails that Jira mail handler couldn't handle, see below extracted from documentation:

Forward Email

If specified, then if this mail service is unable to handle an email message it receives, an email message indicating this problem will be forwarded to the email address specified in this field.

Note: An SMTP mail server must be configured for this option to function correctly.

You can refer to the original documentation below:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Creating+Issues+and+Comments+from+Email

Hope this helps :)

[Scott Blanchard]

+1 Absolutely. That's exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks!

[richie_gee]

You are most welcomed, glad to be able to assist :)

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Hi Scott,

How do we configure Jira's inbound mail handler so that when it receives a message from a user it does not recognize

This sounds like your remote user does not have a JIRA account? Well, the default mail handler can allow automatic user creation, then, you're done (assuming default user access to the related project), but there are licensing implications.

If you are unable to create users, an alternative is JEMH, this is a commercial mail handler that can solve this problem by collecting any non-JIRA users email addresses and storing them in a custom field. A proxy user is used to create the actual issue, once created, your JIRA notifications schemes can fire to notify you, but also, JEMH has full support for notifying the remote non-JIRA account holders too. For those email-volume sensitive users, you can even restrict by event, what emails they receive.

Does that sound like it would solve your problem?

[Scott Blanchard]

+1 Hi Andy, the auto user creation is an interesting idea. I'll open a discussion with our Jira admin on that.

Thanks very much for all the help. I didn't expect such a great response, and so fast. So I'll be back here again soon I'm sure.

This is very helpful. Again, HUGE thanks!

~ s

[Scott Blanchard]

Thanks Janet. Glad to help in whatever small way I can to help others. And very happy to know that you guys are on top of improving usability enough to act on incidents like this.

[Janet Albion]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the suggestion. I just created a new improvement request at https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-32023 based on your use case.

You might want to contact the JIRA Email This Issue Plugin team if this can be workaround using the plugin https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.metainf.jira.plugin.emailissue