Why do I get HTML mails with no actually useful content?

Question

Hi everyone,

I've configured to get mail notifications for everything related to my work and configured to get a plain text representation of that. Reason is that I would like to have additional search capability for comments using my mail client. Today I received  a few of those mails in a different format, looks pretty much like totally useless HTML. Useless, because instead of the actual changes it contains "View Updates"-links for everything which actually has changed. Those mails look like the following:

Can anyone tell me what this is and why I received that? Hopefully Atlassian isn't "improving" on mails and removing plain text… :-/

Thanks!

Thorsten Schöning · Answer

That doesn’t yet explain why your plain-text preference was ignored. Are you still receiving normal plain-text notifications from the same Jira site alongside these HTML emails?

Yes and a few hours ago the mails from the same user as in the screenshot above were still plain text with content. Though, that user is an external developer, so in theory your policy might have been applied for reasons… But I have many external DEVs and these few mails were the only ones. Seems like I need to wait until next week, when they come back and produce more mails.

Thanks for the idea to check for. If the orga admin changed things, I'm most likely out of luck anyway. :-/

Matthew Sinclair · Answer

Ok - that's new - I didn't see this on the test (ACP-520) - but knowing we can do that - that's pretty impressive. I know of the policies - didn't know it could be that granular.

I had a notion it may be something related to that - just couldn't remember specifics.

Good catch!

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hello @Thorsten Schöning

The missing comment text could be caused by an external-user security policy.

Could your organization admin check Security → User security → External users, select the policy applying to your account, and review Email and notification visibility? If it’s set to Block, that would explain the missing content. Here’s the relevant documentation.

That doesn’t yet explain why your plain-text preference was ignored. Are you still receiving normal plain-text notifications from the same Jira site alongside these HTML emails?

Best,

Arek🤠