Experienced Behaviour

• Customer sends email to a Jira Service Management project that has been configured to receive email.
• Jira retrieves this message from the mailbox and processes it with errors. A ticket is not created and no notifications are sent to the customer.

Expected Behaviour

• The customer is notified that the email was received but the issue could not be created
• The Service Desk Manage, Jira Administrator, or Agent, receives some notification that an email was received but a issue could not be created or updated

Example:

Using the Welcome to Service Desk (DESK) project with default request types

• Email configured to create "Get IT Help" type issue
  • This request type has two two required fields, summary and description.
• Customer sends email to service desk
  • Customer includes a subject but leaves the body of the message blank

The message is processed by Jira with errors. No notification is received by the customer, agent, or administrator.

atlassian-jira.log shows:

2014-08-07 08:57:03,516 atlassian-scheduler-quartz1.clustered_Worker-2 ERROR user@domain.com    Mail handler used by JIRA Service Desk. Do not modify or delete. 10,000 [internal.feature.incomingemail.IncomingEmailManager] Message body is empty where Description field is required

Example 2:

Jira Service Desk customer is marked inactive in Jira list of users

• Customer emails reply to existing ticket

The message is processed by Jira with errors. No notification is received by the customer, agent, or administrator.

atlassian-jira.log shows:

2015-01-24 02:32:16,415 atlassian-scheduler-quartz1.clustered_Worker-3 ERROR dev0123    Mail handler used by JIRA Service Desk. Do not modify or delete. 10,200 [internal.feature.emailchannel.IncomingEmailManager] You do not have permission to create comments

Workaround

Jira Service Management Data Center and Server 5.1 includes a new email channels audit log. You can now easily check if the connection with your email channels is active and make sure all incoming emails are being processed correctly. The audit log consist of two different tabs:

• A processing log that shows every message received from the connected email account. It allows you to search and filter to find specific emails.
• A connectivity log. Jira Service Management attempts to connect to and pull new messages from your email channel every 60 seconds. The connectivity log shows the history of the results of each attempt.
  See here for further information.

While this doesn't directly resolve this suggestion, it does provide more information for admins to monitor the status of email channels and incoming emails.