How to Automate Emails to JIRA Tickets (2024)

There is a way you can set up an email to automatically create a ticket to any project you like.

The best way for this to work is to use a Gmail account — as JIRA links most easily with Gmail. You would then need to add this Gmail email into a distribution list email address for staff members to email for creating those tickets. But if you’d like to use your own company’s email distribution list, then it's simple enough to do — just check with your service desk team that the email list you want to use as a username and password associated with it.

There are 2 steps to complete to get this system setup.

NOTE: Please set up the Mail Server FIRST, then the Mail Handler.

Step 2: Create Incoming Mail Server

1. Go to: JIRA Setting > System > Incoming Mail
2. ClickAdd POP/IMAP mail server
3. Name:Give the mail server a name
4. Description:Add something useful to identify what this mail server is being used for
5. Protocol:SECURE_IMAP
6. Host Name:pop.gmail.com(Or whichever host you are using /your company’s own host)
7. POP/IMAP Port: 995
8. Timeout:10000
9. Username:use the email address as the username
10. Save this

Step 2: Create a Mail Handler

1. Go to: JIRA Admin > System > Incoming Mail
2. Click onAdd incoming mail handler
3. Fill in the following details:
4. Name:Name this to link with the mail server you setup above
5. Server:Select the server you created from Step 1
6. Delay:You could set this to whatever you want, but we set it as 1
7. Handler:The best option is the first one: “Create new issue or add a comment to an existing issue”. This allows you to create a ticket when you send an email to that email account, and also adds a comment to the ticket whenever you reply to that specific email chain.
8. Folder Name:Usually you should leave empty
9. ClickNext
10. Select the JIRA Project you want the ticket to be created to
11. Set the issue type the ticket will be raised as by default
12. Leave Strip Quotes unchecked
13. Catch email address: Leave empty
14. Bulk:Ignore the email and do nothing
15. Forward email address: Leave empty
16. Create Users: Leave unchecked. (This will not create a new user everytime an email is sent by an email address that does not exist in Jira)
17. The default reporter needs to be set from an existing JIRA user
18. Notify Users, CC Assignee and CC Watchersshould all be checked.
19. ClickTestto see if the connection works. If so, ClickSAVE.

This should cover everything that is required to get emails to automatically create tickets to a certain JIRA project, without it creating user accounts.

As soon as an email is sent to that email account, the mail server is automatically checking if that sender’s email address already exists amongst the current JIRA user account database.

If it does, then that user will be set as the REPORTER. If not, the default REPORTER will be set. Either way, NO New user accounts are created, which is an issue when you have limited user