Unable to Decode Mail Subject or Body when Creating Issue From Email
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles for non-Data Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Symptom
When 'Create Issue From Email Service' is used, sometimes JIRA may fail to decode the mail subject or mail body when mail is sent from some mail clients, such as Swedish Outlook Express or Lotus Notes.
Cause
The encoding pattern of email sent from those mail clients does not follow the standard. In the known cases, we see it drop the space used to separate the end mark of encoding section (?=) and the begin mark of the next encoding section. This causes JAVAMail to fail in interpreting a decoding for mail subject or body.
The correct spacing should be:
... XXX?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?XXX...
The incorrect spacing is:
... XXX?==?iso-8859-1?Q?XXX...
Workaround
Add the Java option -Dmail.mime.decodetext.strict=false to instruct the JIRA instance to be less strict while interpreting the encoding pattern. See Setting Properties and Options on Startup.
Resolution
Adjust the sender's mail client to enforce the strict encoding pattern.