Confluence Cloud not generating email notifications

Question

This used to work but stopped some time ago. As traffic on our site is increasing it is becoming more important that people get "poked" when something changes, and don't have to poll the tool manually.

I'm a space admin with autowatch turned on, and notify for my own changes also enabled. When others comment on pages I own, or i edit a page, there is just deafening email silence. This has caused me to miss a couple of important updates.

At the administration organization level I have confirmed that our ISP domain verifies as being owned and also that the SPF and DKIM DNS records are set correctly via the Atlassian validation page. We did have the same issue with Jira cloud and I *think* that is working. Some people do get email, but not enough traffic yet to verify completely.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be going wrong here?

Shannon S · Answer

Hi Ken,

Thank you for letting me know that. It's true that if we get a message back from your ISP saying that an email doesn't exist or is invalid, we will blacklist future emails in our system to that message. This is by design so that we don't use up server resources sending messages to emails that may no longer exist.

The blacklist is across our products, so if it was cleared for Confluence it should be cleared for Jira too.

You can try to trigger the email again in Jira and if you continue to have issues receiving the emails, go ahead and raise a new support ticket.

Regards,

Shannon

Ken Brough · Answer

This has now been resolved after much to-and-fro between myself and support from both Atlassian and my ISP. It was an Atlassian issue.

A few months back we switched ISPs and what appears to have happened is that some auto-generated email got sent at exactly the wrong moment during the transition, and bounced. Atlassian's response to an email which bounces is to blacklist the email addresses of the recipients. From that point forward no email will get through to those recipients - there is no attempt to resend after some delay, or a "manual" email to the active users with those email addresses (who are actually paying for the service by the way) to double check if black-holing them is the right thing to do.

I have been removed from their "bounce" list and notifications are once again flowing.

Granted, this is an unlikely set of circumstances but it seems the above approach is pretty draconian. Especially now when there is much more domain and DNS validation happening. I would suggest that a better approach would be to cross check addresses with active users before black-holing them. If a user is active, attempt a resend, and if that fails contact them directly so they can investigate, as I had to.

The ticket in question is: JST-491782

I am also going to raise the same issue with Jira as I suspect the same thing is happening there.

Shannon S · Answer

Hi Ken,

Thank you for contacting us about this.

The best course of action here is to raise a support ticket with the Cloud Support Team. The team has access to the server logs and can tell why a notification might not be going out. They will be able to tell you what's happening here.

As soon as you are able to come to a conclusion with the team, please update us here. We'd love to know what was going on in case it can help other users in the future.

Regards,

Shannon