Setting up the email channel

Your customers can open requests and communicate with your service team by working from their familiar email box when the email channel is enabled for your service desk.  Here's how it works:

• A customer sends an email to the email account designated for your service desk. 
• A new request is created based on the email. The customer receives an email notification that contains the details of the request.
• Your agent sees the issue in one of the queues and works on the issue. When customer-visible comments are added to the issue or the status of the issue is changed, the customer receives email notifications.
• When the customer replies to email notifications, the reply is  added as a comment to the issue. 

Enabling the email channel for a service desk

Before you begin

• You must be a JIRA administrator, that is you have the JIRA Administrators or JIRA System Administrators global permission.

• If your service desk does not allow public signup, set up user accounts for your customers. 
  Every customer must have an account before they can create requests. Email messages sent from unregistered email addresses are not processed. 

• If you use POP, make sure that your inbox is empty. 

  Why and how?

  To link your email account with a service desk using POP, JIRA Service Desk requires the inbox of your email account to be empty. 

  Starting with an empty inbox ensures that you do not lose emails unintentionally because emails are deleted after they are pulled in by JIRA Service Desk when you use POP. To empty your inbox, you can move the existing messages to another folder, archive them or delete them.

  If you want certain messages in your inbox to be pulled in by JIRA Service Desk, you can move them back to your inbox after the connection is established.

  JIRA Service Desk uses a built-in email processor to manage incoming emails in service desk projects. It's purpose-built for service desk projects and works differently from JIRA mail handlers. Issues created via JIRA email handlers don't show up as service desk customer requests. For this reason, we don't recommend using a JIRA mail handler for service desk projects.

How

1. In your service desk, go to Settings. In the left-hand navigation, choose Email settings. 
    
2. Click Turn it on. Follow the prompts to add your email account and select the default request type for requests created from the email channel. For Gmail and Yahoo Mail, you only need to enter your credentials. If you use other mail services, you will need to provide server details as well.

After the email channel is set up, JIRA Service Desk will take note of when it connected to the email account for the first time. Any new messages sent to your inbox after that time will be pulled in as new requests or comments. Customers will receive email notifications about the details of their requests. For information about notifications, see Configuring JIRA Service Desk notifications. Messages that already exist in your email account are not processed. 

A test email will be sent to the email account shortly, and you will see a new request created for it in one of your queues in JIRA Service Desk. 

Disabling the email channel for a service desk

Service desk administrators, i.e. project administrators, can disable the email channel for their individual service desks. Once the email channel is disabled, all the email settings for the service desk are removed from the system. This means that a JIRA administrator needs to be involved for the email channel to be re-enabled.

Managing the email channel for multiple service desk projects

JIRA administrators can get an overview of all the service desks in the system that use the email channel and the email accounts linked with them. 

1. Choose > Add-ons. Scroll down to the JIRA Service Desk section and choose Email settings.

    Keyboard shortcut: 'g' + 'g' + start typing 'email settings'

On the Email settings page, you can also test the connection to the linked email account. 

Using multiple email accounts

You can only link one email account with JIRA Service Desk. If you use more than one email address to interact with your customers and want to integrate them with JIRA Service Desk, you might be able to achieve this by setting up forwarding rules or aliases. What these two options can achieve is that all the email messages from your multiple email accounts will land in the email account linked with JIRA Service Desk and therefore be pulled into your queues. You will need to configure the settings in your mail server.

User accounts created from email requests  

When customers send an email for the first time, new user accounts are created automatically for them if your service desk is an open desk and allows public signup. For information about public signup, see Configuring public signup .

User accounts for service desk customers are free and do not count towards your license. 

The username is their email address and they will receive an email notification about the user account. The user account is also added to the Service Desk Customers role of the service desk and you can find it in the customer list on the People tab.  For information about the role and the customer list, see Setting up JIRA Service Desk users and Managing customers.

FAQs

How are requests created from email messages?

What request types can be used as the default assigned to requests for the email channel?

What happens to email messages in the linked email account?

Why must the inbox be empty for the email account to be linked when using POP?

How are the settings for the email channel related with the JIRA incoming mail setup?