Receiving requests by email

If your customers prefer to raise requests from the comfort of their email inbox, you can set up an email address to receive requests in your service project. Emailed requests are added to your queues, so your team can focus on customers without worrying about missing requests or multiple inboxes.

Before you begin:

  • Make sure you're a Jira administrator and read Managing the email channel to learn more about global mail settings.
  • Enable public signup, or add customers to your service project to ensure that you receive new requests.
  • Set up a suitable request type with Summary and Description as required, visible fields. Any other fields must be optional.
  • Know which emails from your mail client will be processed.
  • If the email address you're planning to set for your project is from Google or Microsoft, you'll need to use the OAuth 2.0 authentication method, as Google and Microsoft are planning to disable basic authentication (user and password). You can configure the OAuth 2.0 integration for your Jira instance and then select it when setting up the email channel for your project.

If you encounter any issues during the email setup process, check out some common errors and resolutions.

Customer requests and comments are processed differently than Jira mail. Issues created via Jira email handlers don't show up as service project customer requests. For this reason, we don't recommend using a Jira mail handler for service projects. Read Creating issues and comments from email for more information.

On this page:

How your customers send requests by email

How receiving requests by email works:

  1. A customer emails a request to your service project email address. The request becomes an issue in your service project and is added to a queue.
  2. An agent comments on the issue.
  3. The customer receives an email notification that contains the agent's comment.
  4. The customer replies to the email notification and the reply displays as a comment on the issue in the service project.


Add an email account

In Jira Service Management Server, you can add one linked email account to each service desk project.

Before you begin:

With Google and Microsoft deprecating basic authentication, you need to configure an OAuth 2.0 integration if you're using one of these email providers. OAuth 2.0 can be configured once by a Jira system admin, and then used as an authentication method in your projects. For more info, see OAuth 2.0 integration.


To add a new email:

  1. From your service project, select Project settings > Email requests.
  2. Select Add an email address.
  3. If you're using Google or Microsoft as email providers, set the authentication method to the OAuth 2.0 integration configured in your Jira instance. You should see available OAuth 2.0 integrations in the drop-down list. 

    When adding your email account, you need to be able to authenticate to the email service provider used in your OAuth 2.0 integration.

  4. Click Save and authorize. You'll be redirected to your email account.
  5. Once authorized, you will see a success message about the channel being enabled. Your customers should now be able to create their requests via email.

Good to know

  • If your Gmail or Yahoo! account uses two-step verification, you'll need to set up an application-specific password.
  • If you use more than one email address to interact with your customers, you might be able to set up forwarding rules or aliases to receive requests in the email linked to your service desk project. You will need to configure any forwarding rules or aliases in your email clients.

Choose a request type for email requests

To use the email channel, you need to have at least one request type in your project with visible Summary and Description fields. Associating email requests with a suitable request type ensures that the emails are successfully filtered into your service desk queues.

To choose a request type:

  1. From your service desk project, select Project settings > Email requests.
  2. Click Edit next to the email address.
  3. Use the dropdown to select a Request type.
  4. Click Done to confirm your request type.

List of request types that you can assign to your email channel.


Verify your linked email account

Once you have chosen a suitable request type, Jira Service Management sends a test email and creates a corresponding test request.

To verify your email:

  1. From your service desk, go to Queues.
  2. Verify that your linked email account works by finding the new request.

New messages sent to your linked email account appear as service desk requests in your project.


Set up permissions so customers can send email requests

Before you share your email address with your customers, check your customer permissions.

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Further reading

Check out Managing the email channel to learn how to:

  • control what happens to email addresses that are added to the To or CC field of an email associated with a service desk request
  • choose whether to allow emails from addresses which are not registered as customers of your service desk to be added as comments to the associated request

How different types of emails are processed

Jira Service Management processes different emails differently. See the option that applies to you:

Emails using POP

Jira Service Management looks for messages in your inbox that have:

  • the Deleted flag set to false
  • were received after your email account and service desk project were linked.

To link your email account with a service project using POP, make sure that your email inbox is empty by moving the existing messages to another folder, archiving them, or deleting them. Starting with an empty inbox ensures that you do not lose emails unintentionally, as POP emails are deleted after they are processed by Jira Service Management.

Emails using IMAP

Jira Service Management looks for messages in your inbox that have:

  • the Deleted and Seen flags set to false
  • were received after your email account and service desk project were linked.

If you use IMAP, emails are marked as read (not deleted) after they are processed by Jira Service Management. If you want existing messages to be pulled in by Jira Service Management, you can move them back to your inbox and mark them as unread after the connection has been established.

Last modified on Feb 11, 2021

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