Replies to a Service Desk email from an unknown user should add comment to original issue and not create a new one

Summary

When a customer of a JIRA Service Desk sends an E-mail from Service Desk to another person (who is not an agent, reporter or request participant) of the issue, if that additional party replies to the issue and includes the JIRA Service Desk E-mail, the E-mail is treated as a new issue, even though:

• Subject Line contains the Issue Key,
• Email Headers are still intact.

For Example:

1. Customer 1 raises a Service Desk request.
2. Agent 1 responds to the Service Desk Request.
3. Customer 1 receives a response and CC's the response to another Customer (Customer 2).
4. Customer 2 responds to the service desk request, CCing in the same people.

Creating new E-mails under this scenario causes additional overhead for the Service Desk Administrator, and may be confusing to the customer interacting with the Agent, due to the fragmented nature of the E-mail interactions

This was introduced as a result of the changes in: JSD-1876 which fixed an issue when a user who was not a Service Desk customer responded to a Service Desk Email.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Set up a new Service Desk
2. Create an Issue and Send a Comment to a customer as an Agent
3. As a customer forward the issue to a colleague to get help responding to the Agents queries
4. Respond to the agent, and customer as the external party.
5. The response will not be linked to the existing issue unless you are already a request participant of the issue.

Expected Results

JIRA Service Desk should be able to detect the E-mail trail relates to a specific issue, and give the customer an option to enable Automatic request participants based on Email interactions.

Actual Results

JIRA Service Desk fails to recognise that the Emails in the aforementioned scenario relate to a pre-exiting issue, even thought the Email contains the correct headers, subject line, and the other users in To/CC fields are the customer and the Service Desk Email address.

Notes

The current functionality for inbound E-mail appears to be:

1. Check who the sender of the Email is
2. Add sender as a new customer if they are not (depending on SD configuration)
3. Decide what to do with E-mail content based on the sender's authorisation.

Workaround

Please use either Service Desk Automation or the JIRA Automation Plugin to do this.

Using JIRA Service Desk

1. Go To your Settings under the affected JIRA Service Desk
2. Select *Automation
3. Create a new Rule and select "Custom Rule" with the following:
   1. WHEN: Issue Created
   2. IF: Issue Matches and Create an Advanced JQL filter
   3. THEN: Add a Comment that indicates that the user is not authorised to comment on the request
   4. THEN Issue Transition that Resolves the issue.

Using the Automation Add-on

1. Create a new Rule
2. Set the Issue Event to be Issue Created
3. Set the JQL Expression to something S
4. Add Actions as to how you would like to handle this circumstance.

Note on JQL matching.
The Affected issues are expected to contain:

• Your E-mail Prefix in the Subject line of the Email
• An Issue Key in the Subject line of the Email
• Either a "Re:" or "Fwd:" in the Subject line of the Email.
• The content should contain "This message is automatically generated by JIRA Service Desk."

Therefore we can create a JQL query to match on these issues:

text ~ '"This message is automatically generated by JIRA Service Desk."~0' 
AND 
(summary ~ "Re \\[CDX\\] \\[SD" OR summary ~"Fwd \\[CDX\\] \\[SD") 

You could add different options to this JQL Query as you see the need to do so, such as project filters. See: Performing Text Searches for more hints on this.