How to remove old content from reply emails
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Customers frequently face the issue of having unnecessary or irrelevant content being added as a comment from a reply email to a particular issue.
An email often gets added as a comment to the issue including long threads of previous messages (e.g.: a reply email and the original event notification email to which the reply was sent).
Jira Email This Issue supports the use of regular expressions as a way of separating the latest message from previous ones, and adding only relevant content from a reply email as a comment to the issue.
In this section we will show two different approaches to remove old content from reply emails, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
This is the classical split regex approach, which attempts to split the email body based on how various email clients format reply emails. The problem with this approach is that mail clients format reply emails differently which makes splitting difficult and makes it prone to errors. Here are two examples of the two most widely used email clients (Gmail and MS Outlook), the red frames mark the expressions people usually try to match when wanting to use regular expressions.
Gmail example:
MS Outlook email example:
This approach attempts to split the email body at a well defined, previously known, unique marker.
Why we recommend using a proactive approach with Email This Issue for Jira:
It is easy to use, as it requires creating only one regex pattern.
It does not depend on mail clients.
Information loss is less probable.
Visible markers improve customer usability.
The proactive approach has two small drawbacks:
It requires the use of custom templates in which the markers can be placed.
Due to the need of custom templates, you must implement issue notifications in Jira using Email This Issue for Jira (in case of non-service desk projects).
Using any of the following markers will have only the latest email content above the delimiter be added as a comment. Proactive splitting may be achieved using visible and invisible content markers. Visible Content Marker
1. Simply add a delimiter to the top of the body in your email templates, such as adding:
--Please reply above this line--
2. Add a regular expression that matches the delimiter in the classic mail handler settings:
/--Please reply above this line--/
Result: If the above settings are carried out, the following results are to be expected. The original email is cut using a visible content marker:
Comment added to the issue, email cut above the visible content marker:
Invisible Content Marker
Important: As of now, the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook is not compatible with the invisible content marker, however feel free to use it with the web browser version of Outlook.
If you do not want to add a visible and readable content marker as above, you can add an invisible HTML tag editing the HTML code of your email template, and match it in the regular expression.
1. Add a delimiter to the top of the body in your email templates (in this case the HTML code), such as adding:
<span title="jeti-reply-marker"></span>
2. Add a regular expression that matches the delimiter in the classic mail handler settings:
/\<span title=\"jeti-reply-marker\"\>\<\/span\>/
Result: If the above settings are carried out, the below results are to be expected.
The original email cut with the HTML source to show the invisible content marker:
Comment added to the issue, email cut above the invisible content marker: