How Jira Service Management processes email requests

Jira Service Management Cloud uses a built-in processor to receive and process requests that come from emails. Senders don't need a license to create, view, comment, add attachments, or transition work items created in Jira Service Management Cloud.

Jira Service Management Cloud processes emails in three stages. The email puller fetches emails from the service project’s associated inbox, then the email processor filters pulled emails to remove auto-replies and spam. Next, the database cleaner deletes old emails from the database. Read more about configuring Jira to receive and process emails.

Email puller

The puller fetches unread emails from the associated inbox every minute. It then copies them to the email database. Emails with a total size of more than 25MB (including attachments) are not fetched, and will remain unread in the mailbox or bounce back to the sender depending on whether they were sent to a custom or Atlassian-provided email channel. Emails received before the accounts are connected to the system are not included.

Email processor

The processor filters non-requests from the pulled emails. To do this, it filters emails based on the content of the auto-generated headers.

• Auto-replies filter out emails if the auto-submitted headers contain the keywords auto-generated, auto-replied, or auto-notified.

• Bulk mail filters out emails that the mail server marks as spam.

• Delivery status notifications filter out emails if the multipart/report header contains report-type-delivery-status, or if the return-path header has a null email address.

• Jira mail filters out Jira emails that your site sends by checking if they have X-JIRA-FingerPrint in the header.

Spam and phishing prevention

We use DMARC sender verification to help prevent your project from being used to send spam or phishing emails. Emails that come from participating providers is prevented from reaching your project if the provider doesn’t certify that the sender is who they claim.

To see if you have incoming email that has failed DMARC sender verification, check your email processing logs.

Turn off DMARC sender verification by upgrading to a paid Jira Service Management Cloud account.

Database cleaner

By default, the database cleaner purges all emails in the database that are older than 45 days. You can change the purge to a range of intervals from 14 days to 180 days in Global mail settings.