how can i add external email watchers to a jira issue

Question

we have been using JIRA for just over 12 months are getting more comfortable with it every day.

one issue that I can seem to get my head round is how to add external watchers to a JIRA item

the head of our support team (a user on jira) creates most of the JIRA items for our dev team to work through, how ever in most cases the issue would have originally come from another member of the support team (not users in jira).  he would like to add internal email address  (email addresses within our domain) of the original reporter as a watcher to the issue so they can be kept updated on decisions/activity/status changes

could you advise if this is possible and if so how to do it please;

Also along the same vain, not sure if this is something we want to do now, but would it be possible to allow for email addresses, external to our domain to be added eg the customer who requested the change or feature??

Vladimir Horev - RaleyApps · Answer

Hello,

You can send notifications to Jira external users using Raley Email Notifications

On Jira side you need to provide custom text field that contains users emails.

Cheers,

Vlad

David Cook · Answer

Hey guys, I was researching the same issue and just stumbled upon this add-on, "Bug Watcher." It looks to completely meet your requirement: 
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.metainf.jira.plugin.bug-watcher/server/overview

Tibor Hegyi [META-INF] · Answer

Hi Manney,

Unfortunately JIRA cannot provide this for you. Only addons can.

One is our Email This Issue for JIRA Cloud: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.metainf.jira.plugin.emailissue/cloud/overview

This can deliver notification emails to email addresses, added to a custom field that serves as watchers for externals.

Steps to do:

* Add a text custom field (preferably multiline to store many recipients)
* Store comma-separated list of email addresses in the field in the issues
* Install Email This Issue for JIRA Cloud addon
* Configure an Email This Issue Notification scheme for your project
* Add the events you'd like to send to the externals

More details on notifications: https://metainf.atlassian.net/wiki/x/HgDqAg

Email This Issue allows you to customize the email templates, add or remove fields, send conditional notifications and a lot more.

Configuration should not take more than a few minutes.

In case you have questions, just let me know.

Regards,
Tibor