One Profile or Several?

Owned by Andy Brook [Plugin People] (Unlicensed)
Jun 10, 2012
2 min read

Profiles

A JEMH Profile...

  1. Can be referred to by several Inbound Mail Servers, so configuration for your environment can be consistent over several mailboxes, without duplicating configuration.

  2. May have many catchemail addresses, if used, so long as one matches the incoming to: address, the mail will be processed.

  3. May contain many Project Mappings, each of which is capable of routing many email from: and to: addresses to a particular project.

  4. Performance wise, one Profile per incoming mailbox is possible, but puts extra load on the server as JIRA is responsible for regular polling, JEMH just processes mail that JIRA loads from the Incoming Mail Server.

  5. Administration of 10 Profiles with many complex mappings may be an overhead

1-10 mailboxes?

If your environment contains between 1 and 10 different mailboxes, its most likely that you would be able to do everything required within a single profile, but of course are dependent on processing requirements.

Multiple profiles

Scalability is what JEMH has been designed for. Scalability is not achievable by having one Profile per incoming mailbox, that would be no different than existing JIRA mail handlers.

Options to improve scalability

Per-Project configuration

For small numbers of mailboxes, configuring per-addressee forwarding such that email to: a range of addressees all end up in one physical mailbox will allow a single JEMH Profile to process all mail therein.

Large scale configuration

Achieving a low administration overhead for JIRA was a primary goal for JEMH in this scenario. For large numbers of mailboxes (e.g. one per JIRA project, in an instance with many projects) the per-addressee forwarding could be done but is a significant overhead.

An alternative approach is to use Virtual Mailboxes that are effectively a new mail domain in your organisation, e.g. your mail domain is myco.net, by setting up a domain within your mail environment, say jira.myco.net, one forwarding rule is required to route ALL addressees to that new mailbox.

JEMH has a Project/Project Auto Assign feature that is specifically for this scenario, and will scan all incoming email addressees for a matching project KEY, eg abc@jira.myco.net would cause a project lookup for ABC, if found, that would be the nominated project. See: