Watchers and Approver - notification conflict?

[Rosa M Fossi]

Hello Community, I'm having an issue with a user missing important notifications. I've confirmed that he is watcher, and that the notification scheme has "watchers" 

I can't find a root cause for this issue. The only thing I can think of is that maybe he is an approver for some of these tickets as well as a watcher. Is that known conflict in the notification scheme? 

[Petter Gonçalves · Accepted solution]

Hello Rosa,

The "conflict" you mentioned will not cause the user to don't receive notifications, but there are some other points that could cause it.

Please, check the steps below for further troubleshooting:

1 - If there are any security levels in the issue, make sure the user is added to the security level

2 - Check if the customer is able to access the issue where the comments are being performed. If the comment is group-restricted, make sure the user is added to the group and can see the comment

3 - Check if the notifications are not arriving in the Spam folder

4 - Double-check if JIRA outbound e-mail addresses are whitelisted in the Firewall and in the e-mail server, as described in this documentation:

167.89.0.0/17, 208.117.48.0/20, 50.31.32.0/19, 198.37.144.0/20, 198.21.0.0/21, 192.254.112.0/20, 168.245.0.0/17, 34.211.27.137, 34.211.27.236, 34.213.22.229, 34.249.70.175, 34.251.56.38, 34.252.236.245, 52.51.22.205, 54.187.228.111, 34.209.119.136, 34.211.27.82, 34.212.5.76, 34.253.110.0, 34.253.57.155, 35.167.157.209, 35.167.7.36, 52.19.227.102, 52.24.176.31, 54.72.208.111, 54.72.24.111, 54.77.2.231

Additionally to those steps, please check if the steps of the article below help:

Not Receiving Email Notifications in JIRA Cloud

Let me know if this information helps.

[Rosa M Fossi]

Thanks so much for the thorough response Petterson. 

1. No "issue security" is set in this project
2. Yes. I confirmed via screenshare that the user has access to see the comment from the project.  No group restrictions to view comments (this project is actually pretty wide open permissions-wise)
3. Nothing in spam
4. I'll need to check our exchange

That said, I disagree that the "approver" ~ "watcher" situation isn't a conflict. I asked the user to remove himself from the approver field, and voilà!!! Notifications for comments immediately resumed  <insert "hmm" emoji here> 

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Rosa,

Thank you for the provided details and the workaround you used.

After digging a little bit further and performing some tests with the new information you provided, I realize that when you add the user to the Approvers of the issue, the user is treated as a customer for the purposes of notifications.

That been said,  it is not a "conflict" between the watchers and approvers field, but a bug in JIRA that causes the customer notifications to be used instead of the default JIRA notification scheme once you add the user as an Approver.

Here's the reported bug to our development team:

- Approvers should not be always treated as customers

Feel free to vote and watch the bug to receive notifications about the progress of our developers on its fix implementation.

Let me know if you still have any questions.

[Rosa M Fossi]

Thanks for the link! I'll go vote for it. 

[Petter Gonçalves]

You are welcome, Rosa!

Have a nice week ahead. :)