Incoming emails creating tickets with an empty description
Platform Notice: Cloud - This article applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.
Summary
When sending an email to the Jira Service Management mail handler, agents may encounter a situation where the ticket's description appears empty within Jira, even though the email contains a description. This article provides a diagnosis for this issue and offers a solution.
Diagnosis
In order to identify the root cause of this issue, you will need to download the EML file of the respective email for analysis. Follow the steps below:
Navigate to the Project Settings > Email requests (or Project Settings > Channels > Email for team-managed projects)
Click on View Logs next to the mail handler the email was sent to
Identify the log entry for the respective email
Click on more options (•••)
Choose Download raw email message
After downloading the EML file, open it in any text editor. You'll notice that the email's body does not have the expected Content-Type of "text/html" or "text/plain".
Cause
The root cause of this issue is that the Content-Type of the email's body is not set to "text/html" or "text/plain". Instead, it's often set to "text" or other values, and due to this, Jira Service Management is unable to distinguish whether it should parse the email body as HTML or plain text.
Example:
Check that the Content-Type is set to text, which is the type, instead of type/subtype, for example, Content-Type: text/html), and with that, the body of the email is not being processed, hence empty.
Solution
To resolve this issue, the sender needs to fix the Content-Type header. This can be done with the help of the Email Service Provider or within the application's configuration settings (in case the email originated from a service, such as a monitoring system).
By setting the Content-Type correctly, Jira Service Management will be able to properly parse the email body and populate the ticket's description as expected