So far, we have learned how to use and interact with JIRA directly from its web interface through a browser. However, you are not restricted only to a web browser; you can also communicate with JIRA through e-mails.
One powerful feature of JIRA is its ability to update users on their issue's progress through e-mails, and also create and comment on issues based on e-mails sent from users. This provides you with a whole new option of how you and your users can interact with JIRA. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following:
- How to set up a mail server in JIRA
- Events and how they are related to notifications
- How to configure JIRA to send out notifications based on events
- How to create custom mail templates
- What a mail handler is
- How to create issues and comments by sending e-mails to JIRA
E-mails have become one of the most important communication tools in today's world. Businesses and individuals rely on e-mails to send and receive information around the world almost instantly. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that JIRA is fully equipped and integrated with e-mail support.
JIRA's e-mail support comes in several flavors. Firstly, JIRA e-mails users about changes made to their issues, so people working on the same issue can be kept on the same page. Secondly, JIRA can also poll mailboxes for e-mails and create issues and comments based on their content. The last feature is the ability for users to create and subscribe to filters to set up feeds in JIRA (we will discuss filters in Chapter 9, Searching, Reporting, and Analysis). These features open up a whole new dimension with how users can interact with JIRA.
In the following sections, we will look at what you need to do to enable JIRA's powerful e-mail support and also explore the tools and options at your disposal to configure JIRA to e-mail it your way. The following figure shows how JIRA interacts with various mail servers:
