Over the last 5+ years we have received ongoing concerns from many of our users about JIRA's inability to retain and present the HTML tables, URLs, email addresses etc from the body of emails in the JIRA issues.  When a HTML table with multiple rows and columns is converted to text format in the JIRA issue it is often illegible.  Marek Sandomierski from our JIRA team has recently noticed that this shortcoming has been resolved in JIRA Service Desk. Will this ever be fixed in JIRA Core?

[Explanation provided by Marek Sandomierski]

Generally the request concerns a problem on how JIRA mail handler deals with formatted text in the body of the email (HTML tables, URLs, email addresses etc).

Currently the JIRA Mail Handler converts everything from email body into plain text before entering it to the ticket description and therefore reading some information that was included in the table is almost impossible - this is known issue and it was raised very often by our customers.
Generally the description field allows some special formatting (wiki markup) so there should be some option to provide the input not only in plain text but also in wiki markup.

Few months ago I was testing JIRA Service Desk and to my surprise email sent to JIRA with formatted table went through and format was kept (it was actually converted to wiki markup not a plain text).

I did some research and it turnes our that Matthew McMahon, fixed this for JIRA Service Desk Mail handler (different mail handler then used by JIRA Core/Software). Therefore it is fixed for this product but not for JIRA Core/Software.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-1942
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-3296

It was raised for JIRA Core/Software product, however it was closed w/o any significant input.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-20987