Any Uniux/Linux mail delivery agent MDA - either direct or with plugin on the other side - for Jira?
Asked by Henning Hucke:

I do know that - among other Atlassian tools - Jira is able to pull maildrops and process the pulled mails via diverse rules.  
But since polling is just the second best method I am looking for MDA solutions which actively push mails into the Jira system. This solution would also fit much better into mail system than the pull solution - especially but not only if you don't want to make your maildrop server accessable from the outside.


Answers:
author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You would need to create an entire mail server system inside Jira to do this, and no-one has bothered to write an app for that because it's complex and there are far easier ways to deal with incoming email. You would also need to reconfigure your networks to recognise Jira as an MTA in your systems.

As you say, the mail handlers are reading a proper mail server's inbox by polling them regularly, which is good enough for most people, A push process instead of polling has no significant advantage over that.

If you really do want to do this with less coding than writing a mail server, then you should look to writing something for your mail server - when an email arrives for Jira, have your code read it, and then execute a REST call to Jira to create/comment/update the issue as appropriate.

I did this for a client many years ago because they had an unusual network setup and we weren't able to get Jira to poll certain mailboxes (not for security, but because they were using an external provider, Atos, to provide their networking and they were utterly incompetent). It was as simple as having the mail server run a short bash script when an email was pushed into a mailbox.

comments: author: Henning Hucke
body: Hello Nic.  

I'm not speaking about a "local mail delivery agent" (LMDA) but about a "mail delivery agent" (MDA) in general which would include a "thing" - actually indeed still an MDA - which runs "a server" somewhere an uses the API of Jira to feed/push the mail as a ticket into Jira "somewhere else".  
Another and likely in general more sense-full method - because one would have configurations relevant for Jira directly on the Jira host itself - is to run a [LMTP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Mail_Transfer_Protocol) server on the Jira host. An [LMTP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Mail_Transfer_Protocol) server doesn't do mail processing but is simply a kind of LMDA fed over the network - spooling and the like is done on the remote side.  

Use Case: I want to feed mail tickets into Jira when they arrive on my mail site which I don't want to expose to the internet (via its POP3 and/or IMAP port).  

And as - among other things - a mail admin I assure you that there are *several advantages* of using the sketched way.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: It's the same answer - no-one has bothered to write anything like that because it's a massive development that has no advantages over polling or a simple "convert to a REST call" script.


author: Henning Hucke
body: I doubt heavily that it's a "massive development". Indeed in its simples form it should be just "a simple \\"convert to a REST call\\" script". Nonetheless making it a bit more comfortable and a bit more configurable it would be worth not needing to write it by yourself if it would already exist.

Ok. I take along that obviously nobody already wrote such a "thing" so far. So I either do it by myself or I find it myself in the width of the internet.


Tags: cloud

jira-work-management-cloud