Confluence notifications destination address incorrect

[Andrew Best]

Morning,

Our confluence instance has some how decided to start delivering notification emails to our "From" address.

The From address in confluence is configured as donotreply@ourdomain.com.

When a user modifies a page ive created Confluence is sending the notification to donotreply@ourdomain.com as well as myaddress@ourdomain.com.

Ive been through all the Confluence server and Spaces configs to try and work out where it is getting this destination address configuration from and havent been able to find it.

Anyone got any suggestions?

[Andrew Best · Accepted solution]

I found the root cause of the problem.

The root problem I had was that Confluence edit notifications were ending up in the JIRA inbound mail queue and JIRA was not passing them into tickets. The email just sat in the /var/atlassian/application-data/jira/import/mail/Maildir/new path and consumed disk space.

I could not work out why every time a page edit occurred in Confluence, it was sending the email to the JIRA email address.

Turns out that the a Confluence user account with admin on the Space had the JIRA email address as their contact address in their profile. Therefore, Confluence was notifying the Space admins of the page edit and this was resulting in an email to JIRA. JIRA was ignoring the email because it had the BULK x-header. The mail files would accumulate in the above path.

The fix was to:

• Identify all the accounts in Confluence that had the JIRA email address in their profile.
• Change the address to something else.
• For a couple of the accounts I didnt care about the emails so setup a donotreply address in MS Exchange as per http://serverfault.com/questions/532576/no-reply-address-in-microsoft-exchange

[105349]

Awesome, thanks for the detailed writeup on the fix, Andrew!  

[Andrew Best]

Hey Cody,

We're using MS Exchange.

Both the links provided refer to JIRA notifications. This problem is for notifications from Confluence.

[105349]

Hey Andrew!  I know they're for JIRA, but Confluence uses the same notification backend, so they should be valid fixes.

Is there any chance you can check with your Exchange team to see if anything has changed recently?  Specifically regarding anonymous access, forwarding, and handling rules?

[105349]

Hey Andrew!  

What do you use as your email server?  I've seen similar issues with JIRA and Exchange in the past.  Check out these two docs:

Notification emails don't contain correct From address

Wrong email sender displayed in notifications from JIRA

Thanks!