Troubleshooting issues with the email channel

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This page contains information about the errors you might run into when setting up the email channel for your service desk. See the Resolving errors section below for more information about generating an application-specific password (e.g. if 2-factor authentication is enabled for your email account), resolving email connection issues, and ensuring that customers who raise requests by email are correctly notified. 

Checking the connection

To troubleshoot email channel issues, the first thing to do is to check the connection between Jira Service Desk and your email account. You will see error messages that show you why the email channel does not work for your service desk.

To check the connection:

  1. Choose > Applications. Scroll down to the Jira Service Desk section and choose Email requests.
  2. Select Test

Resolving errors

The following table describes the common errors and provides information about how to resolve them when available.

SymptomDescription and resolution

Setting up the email channel

Error message:

The email address you entered is currently used by another project's email channel. Please choose another email address. Check out our troubleshooting docs for help resolving the issue.

You can only connect an email address to one service desk project in your Jira Service Desk Cloud site or Server instance. If you try to use the same email address to set up the email channel in another service desk project, you'll receive this error message.

You can also receive this error message if you are trying to use multiple email aliases that point to the same email account for multiple service desk email channels.

To resolve this:

  • Choose another email address for the email channel you're setting up or for the one that already exists.

Setting up a Gmail account

Error message:

Unfortunately JIRA couldn't connect to the mail server. Here is what the mail server said: "[ALERT] Please log in via your web browser: http://support.google.com/mail/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=78754 (Failure)

If you have two-factor authentication enabled for your Gmail account, you'll likely receive this error when entering your login details. Alternatively, Jira Service Desk checks email accounts every minute, causing Gmail to suspect inappropriate usage of this account and lock it for security reasons.

To resolve this:

  • Create an application-specific password for Jira Service Desk in your Gmail account settings. Details can be found here.

Setting up a Yahoo! account

Error message:

Unfortunately JIRA couldn't connect to the mail server. Here is what the mail server said: "[AUTHENTICATIONFAILED] (#MBR1240) Please verify your account by going to https://login.yahoo.com"

If you have two-factor authentication enabled for your Yahoo! account, you'll likely receive this error when entering your login details.

To resolve this:

  • Create an application-specific password for Jira Service Desk in your Yahoo! account settings. Details can be found here.

Microsoft Outlook, POP3

Error message:

Unfortunately JIRA Service Desk couldn't connect to the mail server. Here is what the mail server said: "STAT command failed: Exceeded the login limit for a 15 minute period. Reduce the frequency of requests to the POP3 server.

Jira Service Desk checks email accounts every minute. Microsoft Outlook might suspect inappropriate usage of this account and lock it for security reasons.

To resolve this:

  • Use IMAP.

Gmail accounts, POP3

Requests are created from archived messages.

When Jira Service Desk checks your email accounts for new messages, it polls the inbox folder.

Gmail uses labels to classify messages into categories and only has these folders: Inbox, Sent Mail and Bin (or Trash). This means that the archived messages are still considered as in the inbox folder. With POP3, Jira Service Desk is not able to identify archived messages by labels and therefore still brings them in as requests.

To resolve this:

  • Use IMAP.
Customers send emails to create requests, but no requests are created and customers do not receive any notifications.

This problem could be due to one or more of the following causes:

  • The connection to the email account failed.
  • You do not have public signup configured and the customer does not have a user account in the system.
    Every customer must have an account before they can create requests in a restricted service desks. 
  • The default request type for the email channel is unsuitable for the email channel.
Learn more

A suitable request type for the email channel must have the Summary field and the Description field as visible fields. Any other fields must be optional ones. 

To troubleshoot the issue and resolve it:

  1. Check the connection as described previously on this page.
  2. Check if user accounts exist for your customers. If not, create user accounts for your customers. For instructions, see Setting up service desk users. You can also  configure public signup .

This message appears on the Email requests page and prevents you from turning on the email channel.

To resolve this:

  1. In your service desk project, select Project Settings > Request types.
  2. Add a new request type (or choose an existing one).
  3. Select Edit fields.
  4. Make sure both the Summary and Description fields are added and marked as Visible = Yes. You can add an additional Attachment field with Required = No.
  5. Save the request type and head back to Project settings > Email requests.

Last modified on Aug 27, 2018

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