Get Requests via Email the Easy Way with Jira Service Management

One common point of confusion I hear from teams who are new to Jira Service Management (JSM) is how to get requests via email from their customers. They assume they have to go the traditional route of using Jira email handlers, but that's not true! As long as your admin configures the global email settings properly to support it, all JSM projects come with the capability of housing their own email channel. Better yet, it's right in the project settings, so let's take a look!

1. From your project, select Project settings > Email requests
2. Select Add an email address.

3. 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 drop-down list. When adding your email account, you need to be able to authenticate to the email service provider used in your OAuth 2.0 integration.

4. Click Save and authorize. 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.
5. Click Edit next to the email address.
6. Use the dropdown to select a Request type. This tells Jira what type of request to create when an email comes into this channel. Make sure no fields are required and that summary and description are on the screens for this request type (or else this won't work). Jira uses the subject of the email as the issue summary and the body of the email as the description. It cannot set any other specific fields.
7. Click Done to confirm your request type.

After you associate a request type to the email channel, you'll get a test ticket so you can verify everything is working.

Now, before you share your email address with your customers, check your customer permissions. If your portal is open to anyone, then that's fine and dandy, but if it's not then you need to ensure anyone who wants to submit a request via email has a customer account in your portal. You can add them as a customer to allow them to do so. What JSM does is look at the user accounts in Jira to identify which user account matches the sender's email address, so make sure they send from that registered email as well...or this will not work for them!

So what does this process look like now that you have the capability for customers to email requests? 

1. A customer will email a request to your service project email address.
2. The request becomes an issue in your project and is added to a queue.
3. An agent comments on the issue.
4. The customer receives an email notification that contains the agent's comment.
5. The customer replies to the email notification and the reply displays as a comment on the issue in the service project.

Yes, this means that the customer never even has to visit the portal, all of their correspondence can be done by email! This is truly an awesome and user-friendly way to get requests from your customers. I hope this blog has shed light on how easy this is to use and set up.