Documentation for JIRA 4.4. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too.

Some users report having problem parsing unicode-1-1-utf-7 (aka utf-7) emails. JIRA breaks with a stacktrace like:

2007-01-31 12:54:59,176 JiraQuartzScheduler_Worker-2 ERROR [service.util.handler.CreateIssueHandler] Could not create issue!
java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException: unicode-1-1-utf-7
at sun.nio.cs.StreamDecoder.forInputStreamReader(StreamDecoder.java:52)
at java.io.InputStreamReader.<init>(InputStreamReader.java:83)
at com.sun.mail.handlers.text_plain.getContent(text_plain.java:64)
at javax.activation.DataSourceDataContentHandler.getContent(DataHandler.java:774)
at javax.activation.DataHandler.getContent(DataHandler.java:521)
at javax.mail.internet.MimeBodyPart.getContent(MimeBodyPart.java:603)
at com.atlassian.jira.service.util.handler.AbstractMessageHandler.handleMultipart(AbstractMessageHandler.java:236)
at com.atlassian.jira.service.util.handler.AbstractMessageHandler.createAttachmentsForMessage(AbstractMessageHandler.java:201)
at com.atlassian.jira.service.util.handler.CreateIssueHandler.handleMessage(CreateIssueHandler.java:201)
at com.atlassian.jira.service.util.handler.CreateOrCommentHandler.handleMessage(CreateOrCommentHandler.java:115)
at com.atlassian.jira.service.services.mail.MailFetcherService.run(MailFetcherService.java:190)
at com.atlassian.jira.service.JiraServiceContainerImpl.run(JiraServiceContainerImpl.java:67)
at com.atlassian.jira.service.ServiceRunner.execute(ServiceRunner.java:48)
at org.quartz.core.JobRunShell.run(JobRunShell.java:191)
at org.quartz.simpl.SimpleThreadPool$WorkerThread.run(SimpleThreadPool.java:516)

The solution

Hopefully one day, Sun will include support for this encoding natively (see this Sun bug report, but in the meanwhile you can install a library to get this working. Installation is quite simple:

  1. Download the jutf7 jar from http://sourceforge.net/projects/jutf7
  2. Copy the jar to your $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext directory. No other directory will do - it has to be in this (lowest)classloader to be picked up.
  3. Restart JIRA (or Confluence, or whatever is parsing the emails).
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