Looking for guidance on mail handler configuration

[Mike Cunningham]

Let me start by saying I have no background with Jira or it's email capabilities. I'm approaching this from the angle of a mail administrator.  I've been asked to configure JIRA to create issues or comments from email, similar to what's described below.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver073/creating-issues-and-comments-from-email-861253784.html

We are using Office 365 as our mail system.  After reading this article, it sound like there are two different ways to enable this feature- 1. POP/IMAP, 2. File system.  Our company's policy is to disable POP/IMAP on all mailboxes, so I'm leaning toward the File system method.  Questions I have are:

- does JIRA have an SMTP server component  where it will accept incoming mail and set the default incoming directory to the import/mail folder?

- how do I configure the outbound SMTP component?

Any general guidance on this type of configuration would be appreciated

[Dave Theodore -Coyote Creek Consulting- · Accepted solution]

Jira doesn't have native SMTP capability. It needs to relay through an MTA, whether it be remote (like O365) or local (like Sendmail or Postfix running on the host OS.) You're going to need to enable something to connect to O365 mail in order to get the messages. I'm not aware of anything that can read the webui and produce flat files of messages. Jira supports POP3S and IMAPS, which has strong encryption. It behaves as a POP3(S) and/or IMAP(S) client when reading mailboxes.

You could set up Postfix or Sendmail to be an SMTP server and then configure some IMAP server that Jira could read from. This would require a corresponding MX record in DNS so that hosts know how to route mail to this server rather than 0365. This seems like an awful lot of effort in the interest of security theater.  Your security team will have a really hard time getting me to believe a web based mail client that is naked on the internet is more secure than IMAPS. I would recommend putting your energy in to a policy that allows for an exception for service account type mailboxes. We have lots of clients in all types of industries that do this, so there is no regulation or standard that places limits on the use of POP3(S) or IMAP(S) on O365. Sorry for the bad news, but I hope this helps!

[Mike Cunningham]

Thank you very much for your detailed response! I'm going to recommend we use IMAP(s) with security controls such as firewall and authentication rules.