Incoming email intermittently fails

[David Stallard]

We have roughly 10 pop3 email addresses configured in JIRA's Incoming Mail so that any email sent to those addresses causes the creation of a JIRA issue.

With one of these addresses, sometimes the email just disappears and no issue is created.  I've worked with our Exchange team to verify that all emails are in fact getting sent out to JIRA, so it seems to be an issue on the JIRA side.  JIRA doesn't have any record of these emails that I can find, including any messaging in atlassian-jira-incoming-mail.log.  If the user resends the same email it will successfully create an issue, so it doesn't seem to be any problem with the email content itself.

Any suggestions on how we can find what is happening to these disappearing emails?

[somethingblue · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

At this point I would go to System Administration > System > Logging and Profiling and turn on Debug Logging for Incoming Mail.  Once you do that see if the logs provide any additional information.  If it was consistent I would recommend a packet trace as well from the Exchange system to JIRA to see if there are any dropped packets or anything else we can tell from the trace but this doesn't seem to be easily reproducible so I would start with turning up Debug logging and then review the mail logs.  

Depending on the traffic you get the logs can fill up fast so I would recommend monitoring the logs' folder size to determine how fast the logs are filling up space and determine how often to turn on the Debug logging from there.  Once you have completed the testing be sure to turn the Debug logging off.

Cheers,

Branden

[David Stallard]

Just to follow up, the problem turned out to be that our Dev instance of JIRA was also polling this mailbox, so some issues were going to Prod and some to Dev.  We now have Dev polling disabled.