How to exclude certain email replies to JIRA issues?

[Karie Kelly]

We have JIRA setup to allow replies view email. This works great until either someone's email box gets full, has an out of office reply setup, or something happens with the exchange server in which the user receives an email due to notifications, but there is then an automatic reply (e.g. email cannot be delivered). Thus, JIRA then gets in a loop because JIRA receives that automatic reply, logs it as a comment, and sends another notification because a comment was added - and, you can see the circle that happens because another reply is sent, etc., etc.,

When we have exchange updates, this becomes a nightmare because it is not easy to just turn off all email and then turn it back on. I don't like deleting the setup because of the risk of not setting it up correctly again - it is risky (vs just an active/inactive option). And, with so many projects, it takes a significant amount of time to manually set all projects to no notification scheme and then go back and set them all back (to the correct one as we have several).

Does anyone know how we can exclude these auto replies from writing comments?

[EddieW · Accepted solution]

You shouldn't need to update the notifications schemes, but there should be options to ignore out-of-office type messages, and also apply a "bulk" header, which should prevent most clients from sending an OOM to begin with.

Check to make sure JIRA is still including this header on outgoing emails

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+JIRA+Options#ConfiguringJIRAOptions-Options

And validate that the incomming confguration is ignoring or deleting bulk emails.

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

More on PRecendence: Bulk header, http://blog.returnpath.com/blog/jd-falk/precedence

[Karie Kelly]

Thank you for the links!

The JIRA general configurations are set correctly and I have bulk header option turned off.

However, I cannot control the incoming configuration. We have JIRA 6.0.2 and this documentation doesn't seem applicable. The only options we have are the types of handlers and the properties are set and based on the selected handler - we don't have access to any of the properties.

In the case we had today, an individual's email box was full so we had a multitude of comments and the system was in a loop that the message could not be delivered. I might be able to exclude these if I could get to properties - but i don't have the option.

The other situation we run into is when IT does maintenance on the exchange server and no emails go through. If anyone is working in JIRA during this time, then notifications get sent and rejected.