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, add them to your customer list.
Every customer must have an account to create requests. Email messages sent from unregistered email addresses are not processed. If you use POP, make sure that your inbox is empty.
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.
To enable the email channel:
- In your service desk, go to Settings. In the left-hand navigation, choose Email settings.
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 has 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.
Using multiple email accounts
You can only link one email account of your own with a single service desk. If you use more than one email address to interact with your customers and want to integrate them with one 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 your 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 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 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?