This is a big wish, I've broken it down into subsections.

== Root Cause ==

We currently use two systems for managing issues with our customers, and our products. We use Jira on the "project management" side of things (assigning and tracking issues, release management, ie: your classic Jira usage). We also use a trouble-ticket system (OTRS http://otrs.org/) to handle all our incomming "support" email.

There is some overlap between these two systems: basically, we will often have a support email that we want to turn into a bug or feature request. In this case, we manually create a JIRA and say "see ticket number 1234".

Since there is some overlap, we (of course) wish that it was just the one tool.

== The Wish ==

This wish comes in 3 parts:

1) intelligent inbound email processing
JIRA does most of this already, but for completeness:
a) thread tracking (OTRS does this by prepending a [TICKETNUMBER] to the subject field in replies, which is entirely adequate).
b) inbound sorting: sort email into different queues (projects?) based on header info (specifically the To field) . It is not enough to sort on the pop account, as we have multiple email aliases mapped to the same pop box.

2) outbound email
A way of being able to reply to a "thread" and have the email sent to the originator of the ticket. We don't want to create real jira users for all of email correspondants. As I write that, I'm imagining a special kind of issue-type, where I can "reply" similar to "add comment" but I also have To, CC, Subject fields, etc.

3) ticket management, escalation
A good ticketing system should force you not to forget to reply to unanswered email, so alerts and escalations are a must. OTRS has this feature where it won't show you the inbound queues unless you answer the escalated emails first. (This is both painful and desired :| )

and a 4th sneaky wish:
4) all this should be built into jira so I don't have to faf around writing plugins

== Misc ==

I can't make up my mind if this functionality would be easy to add to JIRA or not.

I have this feeling that the ticket "queues" are different to a JIRA "project". Or at least, I can seem myself changing the project of a ticket quite often (as customers sometimes send emails to the strangest of email addresses).

I was finally prompted to raise a JIRA for this feature after reading http://weblogs.asp.net/ericjsmith/archive/2005/04/12/400011.aspx

(This issue could be attached to JRA-2326)