This Knowledge Base serves as an additional detailed explanation on how Jira Service Desk incoming mail and outgoing mail(notification) works. This structure only applies to Jira Service Desk v2.5.x - v3.x.

Few key information need to be understood by Jira Service Desk users:

Incoming Mail

1. Jira Service Desk uses different incoming mail handler from the conventional Jira mail handler
   1. Jira Service Desk incoming mail handler (used by Jira Service Desk customer)
   2. Jira conventional incoming mail handler (used by Jira Core/Software/Service Desk Agent)
2. Jira Service Desk Customer and Jira Service Desk Agent has separate configuration setup. Jira Service Desk Agent is to be treated as Jira's internal user(similar config as Jira Core and Jira Software users), while Jira Service Desk Customer is handled solely on Jira Service Desk.

Notification Mail

1. Jira Service Desk Customer and Jira Core/Software/Service Desk Agent uses the same outgoing mail (notification) handler, however, different notification configuration
   
   1. Jira Service Management Customer uses a default Jira SD notification configuration as below(3).
   2. Jira Core/Software/Service Desk Agent uses the notification scheme which you configured on the project side
2. You can differentiate the origin sender of the notification by looking at the format of the mail received:
   1. This is a notification coming from Jira Service Management
      
   2. This is a notification coming from Jira
      
3. Jira Service Management Customer will only receive notification on below condition:
   
   
   1. Jira Service Desk notification to customers cannot be modified. It is not configured in the configuration for Jira's notification. Modifying these configurations will only change Jira Service Desk Agent's notification config. 
   2. You can only configure this setup for your Jira Service Desk customers : Configuring Service Desk notification
   3. A feature request regarding the capability to modify this notification, exist :  JSD-218 - Getting issue details... STATUS
      
      

Below is a use-case flow on how the incoming and outgoing notification works in Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management Incoming Mailbox : JSDMail@mail.com - This is configured at the email request configuration for Service Desk Jira's Mailbox : JiraMail@mail.com service project Customer sends a mail to JSDMail@mail.com to create an issue in Jira Service Desk. The email is handled by Jira Service Desk incoming mail handler and issue is created in Jira Service Desk Project When there is an update to the issue, Jira Service Desk Project will trigger Jira's Outgoing mail handler (JIRAMail@mail.com) : The update can trigger an email notification which the sender will be showing as JiraMail@mail.com. This will trigger to : Notification to service project Agent Notification to the service project Customer itself For service project Agent, when they reply to this notification (to update the issue), their mail reply will go to Jira's Incoming Mail Handler mailbox directly JiraMail@mail.com. Jira's Incoming Mail Handler will handle this mail and update the Jira Service Desk issue accordingly However, for service project Customer, when they reply to this notification (4B), it will go back to (1) where their mail reply will go to service project Incoming Mail Handler mailbox JSDMail@mail.com . This is because for notification sent to customer which originates from JiraMail@mail.com , it will have the reply-to in the mail as  JSDMail@mail.com (which routed the mail to the correct service project mailbox)