Mail handler downloads gmail conversation as separated tickets

[lziegler]

Here's my setup:

- Jira checks my GMAIL every 5 minutes, since I want to keep a copy of the email in my inbox I setup JIRA to look for my Tickets folder which in gmail is named as labels.

- The problem is, I can't mark one email only with the "tickets" tag. Gmail marks a whole conversation with a group of emails.

- Let's say in the group of emails marked as tickets all subjects are the same. The only difference is that the subject sometimes starts with "RE:" or "FWD:".

- In JIRA email handler I have chosen "Create issue or add a comment to" expecting that when the title is the same it would create a ticket and then add the following emails with the same title as comments to it. Isn't what it was supposed to do?

- The way it acts now is creating a ticket for each email, doesn't matter if the title is the same. So a conversation of 6 emails become 6 tickets instead one ticket and 5 comments

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Gmail isn't your ticket management system, JIRA is. Gmail is your mailbox, through which JIRA sends mail and pulls replies. When JIRA issues notifications, they get the issue KEY. When users reply, those replies go to the mailbox, with the KEY in the subject.

Subject matching isn't done in the create/comment handler. The way most handlers work is to expect an issue KEY in the Subject.

Subject matching is not an exact science, and with large numbers of users, will eventually end up with numerous 'password expired' comments on a monday morning! Despite that, this is something I'm thinking about adding subject matching to JEMH, which does a couple of extra things.

[lziegler]

My idea was to use JIRA internally only. Most of requests come through emails. Some of those emails can go straight to JIRA as a ticket but some requires more information, that's when a conversation starts.

Once I get all the information I need, then I convert the conversation to a ticket(where the problem is, subject matching would be great here).

End user never knows that there's a ticket system running on the backend.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Well, as you find, you need subject matching to support that model. An alternate option is with JEMH, which can store 'sender' email address in a custom field (so no users need to be created), that JEMH can issue notifications to later (but yes, this does rely on issue keys in the subject for future associations).

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

When I implement JEMH-837 the need for issue keys in notifications will be lifted, so long as people reply to emails generated by JEMH. With that done, it will be possible to correlate multiple replies with a single JIRA issue automatically, whilst also enabling the existance of JIRA to be hidden from the users. On the short list.