Why am I getting weird behavior when "mentioning" a valid Jira user (email errors in mail queue).

[Deleted user]

Our Hardware team has a Project in JIRA. Up until our recent upgrade to Jira 7.13, they could use the "mention" function in Jira to reference a user by name in an issue, and that user would get an email notification. 

We couldn't figure out why there were literally dozens of email errors in the mail queue, all having similar "<username> mentioned you on <issue number> (Jira)" Subjects.

After lots of dead ends, we went to Administration/Projects/Project Settings and for the Notifications "Email" setting, we removed all spaces and replaced with underscores. For example "Jira_HW_Project_Name" <do_not_reply@ourcompany.com>.

I can't find anything in the Atlassian articles that mentions this as a requirement for enabling the correct function of the "mention" feature. Does anyone in the Community have an idea why the Email setting for a Jira Project (in Administration/Projects) can't have any spaces in it?

Thanks for any ideas. Although this seems to be working now, I have an odd feeling that we accidentally figured out a workaround for a problem that may have a better solution.

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

Sounds like you did an upgrade of Jira and since that time, you seem to be getting a number of email failures for notifications where a users to @ mentioned in a specific project.  A pair of questions for you:

1. Do you happen to know what version of Jira you upgrade from when you went to the 7.13.x version?
2. Does this affect all projects?  Or just this one?

I'm also unclear on the setting you say you changed here.  If I navigate to the project settings -> Notifications, I can see an email address here, but I don't see it encapsulated with a Full Name and <user@example.com> like you stated. So I'm concerned to better understand if perhaps the value you changed might exist in another location, such as the Outgoing mail settings.  I have not seen another case yet that mimics your description here, so this is rather strange so far.

The email address itself can't have spaces in it, at least that's not permitted the rfc standard.  But the name the Full name of the sender doesn't have this restriction.  So I'm rather confused because I don't really yet understand where you might have changed that value within Jira yet, or if it even makes a difference here.

Curious to learn more though.

Andy

[Deleted user]

It affected all projects that had any spaces in their "name" part of the email address. This was going from Jira 6.3 to Jira 7.13.

The fix that was applied to all such Projects was to replace any such whitespace in the email address. In the example screenshot below, what was previously "JIRA Support" was replaced with "JIRA_Support". (An underscore was inserted where there used to be simply whitespace. The "do_not_reply@ourcompany.com" was unchanged (except I replaced our company name with a dummy for this example).

Outgoing mail settings are fine. This only applies to when someone uses the "@username" function to "mention" a user in an issue. All other notifications and emails from JIRA worked fine.

As mentioned above, we fixed it by applying the underscores where needed - but this was unusual, I thought. 

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for clarifying, mine looks somewhat different. 

I don't have the "JIRA_SUPPORT" that prefaces the address like yours does.  Obviously I'm using gmail.  Perhaps you are using a different mail provider here. Could you let me know who your provider is?  Is this exchange, or outlook365, or some other mail service?

I am curious to see just entering the email address is a valid option here.  Perhaps it is not given the nature of the email provider here.  However our own documentation on setting this up doesn't appear to use the format you are using here.  I'm interested to learn why your notification scheme is setup with this format as opposed to being just the email address itself.

[Deleted user]

The setup reflects the name of the Project that generated the email. The braces (< >) enclose the actual email address, while the text prior to that reflects the name of the project that the email was generated from. In the examples below, you can see that one Project (JIRA_Support) generated a notification regarding an issue in that project, while another Project (JIRA CM Request) generated a notification regarding an issue in that project. Since these are all just notifications, we don't want users actually replying to them, but by using a project-specific name like we do, users can configure their email rules (Outlook) to filter for different project notifications if they want to.

In the Administration / General System settings we use:

Email from

${fullname} (Jira)

(NOTE: The "JIRA CM Request" has since been changed to "JIRA_CM_Request" in order to restore the "mention" functionality, but as noted above, that wasn't a problem with other notification types coming from JIRA). Our Confluence and JIRA

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for clarifying here.  At first I did not believe that defining the fullname was a valid to do within the notification scheme itself, but the more I searched this it appears I am very wrong about that.  My apologies. 

I did some more research on this.  In the process I came across an existing bug that I believe will line up with the problem you are seeing here.  Please check out JRASERVER-61622.   It has not had a lot of views, but this is something that was discovered in the 7.1.7 version of Jira.  So it makes sense that if you did an upgrade from 6.3 to 7.13 that you would also encounter this.  It's likely some code changed back in a 7.0 or 7.1 version that affected this.

I'm also willing to bet that you looked in the atlassian-jira-outgoing.log file when this mention happened, you would see a similar stacktrace error.

But that bug does have a work-around:

Notes

If you add the quotes to the Outgoing Mail configuration and remove the email from the project's notification email (to use the default), the problem is not reproducible. It only occurs if you save an email with quotes directly in the project.

Workaround

Edit the Project's Notification email to something without quotes.

Try this, and please let me know the results.

Andy

[Deleted user]

You're correct, Andy!! That turns out to be exactly the bug we were afflicted with!

Our workaround was to put underscores wherever there was white_space in the fullname portion - but I tested the suggested work-around, and it also works!

Thanks for the follow-up. 

P.S. I'm not surprised about the issue not having a lot of views. It is kind of a corner case. I'm glad you found that!