I beg you JIRA, stop emailing me!

[#1]

JIRA sends lots of email, at first I thought they were getting paid for every email they send but until now I haven't found any proof.

There's a couple of ways to lower the amount of emails you get from JIRA but I'll focus on two:

• Stop watching 
• Update when an email is sent

Stop watching 

This is something you can manage yourself pretty easily. By default JIRA adds you as a watcher to all issues you update, transition, comment on, etc.

By becoming a watcher on an issue you most likely will get an email about every change! By disabling this auto-watcher in your profile preference you take full* control over which issues you watch (and what updates you get from JIRA)

* Full control will only be granted if the notification scheme of the project has been setup to only send emails to Watchers of an issue. See the next part of this blogpost: Update when an email is sent

Update when an email is sent

As I mentioned in the first part, when and to who an email is send is completely configurable. JIRA uses a concept called Notification Schemes to do so. I won't go over the details on how to configure a Notification Scheme here but if you want to know more, checkout the very comprehensive documentation of Atlassian: Create a Notification Scheme or this great blogpost from TechSolCom.

In short: a notification scheme configures when (what action) and to who an email will be send. The Default Scheme will send an email for every event to the Reporter, Assignee & Watchers of an issue. I guess you now understand where the JIRA emails are coming from! 

An interesting approach which I'm a big fan of is to limit the emails to be send to Watchers only! This allows all users to decide on an issue per issue basis whether or not they want to keep up to date.

Questions?

Feel free to post them in the questions and I'll be happy to answer them!

I'm already a watcher on thousands of issues, how can I get rid of them?

If you want to see on which issues you already are a watcher you can use this JIRA Filter:

watcher = currentUser()

If you want to remove yourself as a watcher from all these issues you can use the Bulk Edit mode of JIRA (yes I've cut out some frames to make the gif shorter ):

[Gustavo Zaera Holo]

Thank you for an extremely useful article. This has been a PIA for me and my colleagues for years!

[Deleted user]

How do you stop getting emails from Jira users when you didnt even have a Jira account?

[Maarten Cautreels]

Hi @[deleted], 

Can you give me an example of that type of notifications? JIRA has several channels from which emails could be sent:

• Default JIRA Notifications
• JIRA Service Desk Notifications
• Addons
• ...

Best,

Maarten

[Deleted user]

Below are the headers and email body. Someone told me this isn't an Atlassian issue, but since it's an Atlassian user, I feel they're misusing your product. I won't check the link they're sending because if they were legit they'd stop emailing after I replied and asked and offer an unsubscribe link. I'd appreciate it if the user could be taken care of here to stop them from sending these through you.  Thanks

Message Body:

spd commented on Service Request SDU-42

Re: s
possible pedophile in your area
ui.benchmarkemail.com/c/l?u=755B39F&e=BE7458&c=D9F85&t=0&email=5xjwIJLDbpbE

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Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2017 14:44:23 +0000 (UTC)
From: "spd (Jira)" <jira@spmdpdd.atlassian.net>
To: noula029+6sz@gmail.com
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[Maarten Cautreels]

Hi @[deleted],

I'm pretty sure that's an email send by JIRA Service Desk. You probably do have an account on https://spmdpdd.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/user/login?destination=portals

You can login on the url above and see what issues you have access to.

An account is automatically created if you send an email to an address configured to their JIRA Service Desk.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Maarten

[Deleted user]

I can't login to that link, but I didn't have an account with them. Never even heard of them til I started getting these emails. Wanted to just contact customer service but no way to do that unless I got an account. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You will need to get in touch with them - they have added you as a customer for some reason.

If you can't log in, you should find that there is a "reset password" link which will send you a mail to get it reset.  Then you'll be able to contact them via their Jira to ask why they've added you.

Or possibly just contact them direct.