Receiving requests by email
How your customers send requests by email
How receiving requests by email works:
A customer emails a request to an email address assigned to your service project. The request becomes an issue in your service project and is added to a queue based on the request type.
An agent comments on the issue.
The customer receives an email notification that contains the agent's comment.
The customer replies to the email notification and the reply is added as a comment on the issue in the service project.
Add an email channel
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. The outgoing OAuth 2.0 link can be configured once by a Jira system admin, and then selected as an authentication method in your projects. For more info, see Configure an outgoing link.
If you want to use the Microsoft Graph API protocol for your email channel, follow the steps in Setting up an email channel with the Microsoft Graph API protocol.
To add a new email:
- From your service project, select Project settings > Email requests.
- Select Add an email address.
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 dropdown list.
When adding an email channel, you need to be able to authenticate to the email service provider used in your OAuth 2.0 integration.
Select a suitable request type for this channel.
Optionally, specify the name of the folder where emails are received. The default value is “inbox”.
Note: this value might be case-sensitive, depending on your email provider.Select Save. You'll be redirected to your email account.
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.
Verify your linked email channel
Once you've created a new email channel for a suitable request type, Jira Service Management sends a test email and creates a corresponding test request.
To verify your email:
From your service project, go to Queues.
Verify that your linked email channel works by finding the test request.
New messages sent to your linked email channel appear as service requests in your project.
Set up permissions so customers can send email requests
Before you share an email address with your customers, check your customer permissions.
If anyone can email your service project, then your email address is ready to be shared. People who email your service project automatically become customers.
If customers have to be manually added to your project, make sure your team creates new customer accounts for them. Otherwise, the customers' requests won't be processed.
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 request
Select whether to allow emails from addresses that aren't registered as customers of your service project to be added as comments to the associated request
Read Managing the allowlist and blocklist for details on how to:
Add trusted domains to your allowlist to make sure that emails sent from those domains are always processed
Block specific email addresses or domains, so you don’t have to deal with spam
How different types of emails are processed
Jira Service Management processes emails in different ways, depending on the protocol. 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 project were linked
To link your email account using POP with a service project, make sure that your email inbox is empty by moving existing messages to another folder, archiving, 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 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.