Take control of your inbox with new ways to manage Jira notifications

[#1]

Hi Community 👋

In November, we launched an early access program for a small group of people to test out some new ways to manage Jira email notifications. Read more about it here.

The early access program was a success so now it’s time to share these exciting changes with all our users!

Over the course of the next few months everyone will have access to a Notifications settings page for Projects and issues where you can personally manage your in-product and email notifications for Jira. We understand the previous experience didn’t offer enough control when it came to choosing what email notifications you actually want to receive, so we gave notifications its own space that’s easy to find, and we’ve given you way more options for configuring them including custom settings for each project you’re in.

The old experience 🧐

Previously, you were notified about all issue activity for relevant issues. but you were able to configure what issues you considered relevant from this list:

• You’re watching

• You’re assigned to

• You’re the reporter on

• You’re mentioned on

• You’ve made changes to

The new experience 🎉

We now allow you to choose issue activity (see the table below for a full breakdown) that you’d like to be notified for, but you will no longer have control over what issues are relevant to you. We’ll generally consider an issue relevant to you if you're watching it, or if you’re the issue’s reporter or assignee. However, this can vary based on your project’s notification settings. Learn more about how this works here.

Here is a full list of configuration options you’ll have:

The below is based on the default notification schemes. If your admin has customized the notification scheme, some of this information may not be relevant to you.

Types of issue activity	Relevant to what issues	Details
You’re assigned to an issue	All issues	When this setting is off, you'll not be notified when someone has assigned you to an issue.
You’re mentioned on an issue	All issues	When this setting is off, you'll not be notified when someone mentions you in the description field of an issue or in a comment.
An issue is created	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when an issue as it is created
An issue is deleted	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when an issue is deleted.
An issue is edited	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when someone edits a field on an issue.
An issue is moved	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when someone moves an issue to a different project.
A comment is added	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when when a new comment is made.
A comment is edited	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when when a comment is edited.
A comment is deleted	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when when a comment is deleted.
A work log is created	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when work is logged on an issue.
A work log is edited	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when a work log is edited on an issue.
A work log is deleted	Issues you’re watching, or issues for which you are the assignee, or reporter.	When this setting is off, you’ll not be notified when a work log is deleted from an issue.

Any changes you make to your notifications settings won’t impact other people in your team or project. All your notification settings (default or custom) act like a filter on top of the notification settings configured by your admin. If your admin has turned off a particular notification, you may not receive it even if you’ve chosen to receive that kind of notification in your settings.

But that’s not all … you can have custom configurations for each project!

We’re also introducing custom project notifications. That means, if you’re across multiple projects, you can specify the notifications you’d like to receive for a project and it will override your default notification settings.

• For example, say you usually want to avoid being notified about comments being edits, so you’ve turned that notification type off in your default settings. However, you’ve been added to a new project, and you need to keep a closer eye on the comments than usual so you create a set of custom notifications so you can be notified when comments are edited only in that project.

You can have up to 50 custom project notification configurations. So even if you’re working across a bunch of projects, you can configure the notifications to suit your needs and keep you inbox under control. Once again, any changes you make to your notifications settings won’t impact other people in your team or project.

Changes for admins

User preferences will apply a filter on top of a project’s notification settings

Admins can still configure their project notification settings/schemes to define the target audience group who should receive a notification for the specified Jira issue events. But users have ultimate control over whether or not they should receive an email through their personal preferences.

Old experience	New experience
Project admins can configure which notifications should be sent to which groups of users.	Project admins can configure which notifications should be sent to which groups of users.
Users could override these by turning off all notifications if they were a part of the watcher, assignee, or reporter group.	Users cannot customise their notification preferences based on the groups or roles they belong to. Instead, they can override project settings by turning off emails for specific types of notifications relating to issue activity.

Removal of Notification Helper admin tool

We’ve also removed the Notification Helper admin tool as we transitioned to this new notification model. We recognise the importance of this tool in providing admins visibility into users' notification preferences to assist in troubleshooting email notification issues, however, we’re aware that there were some problems and limitations which didn’t provide the complete picture. Instead, we recommend using an alternative functionality where admins can log in as another user to impersonate them and view their notification configuration setup to help troubleshoot. We are also exploring a public feature request “Provide a log for Jira outbound email” to provide users with another tool for troubleshooting email notification delivery. Please watch and vote for this issue to stay tuned for further updates!

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Update 14-March-2024: We're hearing feedback that people would like to be notified about their own edits (as in the previous experience). We're in the process of bringing this functionality into the new notifications experience.

Update 11-April-2024: We're currently adding another notification type called "Other issue events" which includes:

• Resolving or closing an issue
• Archiving or unarchiving an issue
• Custom events
• Generic events relating to issue transitions.
  

This additional notification type should be widely available in the next few weeks.

Update 3-July-2024: We have brought back end-user controls to turn email notifications on/off for when you're the assignee or reporter of an issue.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Adarsh Singh Maheshwar  - this is a great update to the notifications system on Jira.

I have to say the double negative "When this setting is off, you'll not be notified..." confused me hehe

Few questions:

• - I am assuming this is completed differant from notifications for tools like Confluence and Bitbucket?
• - RE the "custom configurations for each project" - that is great - is the 50 custom project notification configurations limitation and initial limit in place?
• Is there any form of custom notifications by field or administrative actions available or in the pipeline for site/org admins? This is a 2 fold Q:
  • So for users, will it be possible for them to only be notified of updates to a specific field?
  • For admins, can there be notifications when a project is added/deleted or a group/user is created or updated or user list is exported, etc?

Thanks in advance.

Yatish

[Adarsh Singh Maheshwar]

@Yatish Madhav Thanks for reaching out to us. 

-I am assuming this is completed differant from notifications for tools like Confluence and Bitbucket?

> Yes, you are right. These notification settings apply only to Jira email and In-product notifications.

- RE the "custom configurations for each project" - that is great - is the 50 custom project notification configurations limitation and initial limit in place?

> Yes, this limit is just based on the usage, we will certainly re-visit this number in the future. 

- Is there any form of custom notifications by field or administrative actions available or in the pipeline for site/org admins? This is a 2 fold Q:

• So for users, will it be possible for them to only be notified of updates to a specific field?

        > Nope we are not adding any new notifications these settings are for existing notifications. 

• For admins, can there be notifications when a project is added/deleted a group/user is created or updated or user list is exported, etc?

        > Again, we are not adding any new notifications as part of this release. As mentioned before Notification Hub is to provide users the ability to control existing notifications.  

[Jay St_Gelais]

This new experience was recently rolled out to the Jira instance I use. I somehow lost the ability to set notifications for "You're mentioned in a comment", which is how I had notifications set up previously. When I view my notification settings, I only see the other 9 settings and that one is missing.

Additionally, when this rolled out, all the boxes were automatically checked, leading me to get a flood of uninteresting notifications.

Is this something a site admin can change (I don't have access to this, but I can reach out if it is) or is this a bug with notification that this option is missing?

[Stéphane BOUGET]

Hello

Thank you for this article and the explanation of changes.

Since monday and the recent rolling out, I don't receive email notification anymore when I modify a ticket I previously created or when I create a new one. But I still receive email notification when someone else modifies a ticket I created.

I activated all the checkboxes in the new screen you described in this article (Personnal settings > notifications) for my project. I am admin of this project and let all the notifications activated in the admin screen.

I am not sure to understand correctly, but this change seems to be wanted by you, you wrote in the article : "Previously you were able to configure your settings to be notified about your own changes. As part of our simplification, we've removed this functionality." If so, this is a big regression for me because I use the mail notification of my own modifications as a history, which is useful for instance when we have some discussions with product team and developers team about a previous modification of a ticket.

Do I have a solution to receive the email notifications for my own modifications ?

Regards,

Stéphane.

[Thorsten Schöning]

> Take control of your inbox[...]

I had control of my inbox before this update, thanks. What your update changed was TAKING me control, because currently I'm no longer allowed to receive mails of my own changes. While you might question the reason for doing so, it was MY decision to receive those mails and everyone else could have decided otherwise. Currently you are pretending to know better than me and, surprise, you don't. ;-)

So, when do I get back control over my inbox?

Email notifications for My Changes stopped 2024/03... (atlassian.com)

[David Berclaz]

Thanks for the news @Adarsh Singh Maheshwar 

Is it affecting both team- and company-managed projects?

[Mark Lewis]

Atlassian, please reverse this change.  We no longer receive notification emails when my own customer support staff respond to tickets.

Why on earth did you change this ?  Take control of your inbox ?  You're kidding right ?  This change has broken our customer service experience with our customers.

thanks

[Adarsh Singh Maheshwar]

UPDATE: We're hearing the feedback that people would like to be notified about their own edits (as in the previous experience). We're exploring bringing this functionality into the new notifications experience. Stay tuned for updates.

[Adarsh Singh Maheshwar]

> Is it affecting both team- and company-managed projects?
@David Berclaz Yes, you can configure both CMP and TMP projects 

[Adarsh Singh Maheshwar]

> Is this something a site admin can change (I don't have access to this, but I can reach out if it is) or is this a bug with notification that this option is missing?
@Jay St_Gelais This is enabled for all users, you don't need any admin permission to access this. Please reach out to your admin or our support team if you need help.  

[Jay St_Gelais]

@Adarsh Singh Maheshwar 

Things seemed to have corrected overnight. Maybe I was witnessing a bug with the early release. I now have all 10 options in the configuration panel.

That said, the changes I make don't seem to have an effect. I'm still being flooded with emails anytime any update is made to any issue in our project, despite my settings looking like this:

[Walter Lamm]

Why on earth would you take away the option to define which tickets are relevant? There are people in our company that create tickets but dont't work on them. Now they get flooded with absolutely irrelevant emails and they are angry. We already had a difficult experience with notifications and had to do a lot of damage control with our notification flood but now it got absolutely useless.

This is so irresponsible and has to be implemented ASAP. Until then I have to completely disable notifications altogether it seems.

Horrible choice.

[Andy Newton]

Is there any discussion of reinstating the options from the old way? I think it was the wrong decision to take away users' ability to define which issues are relevant to them. My team sets up Jira tickets for our entire department, and accordingly we're the Reporters on thousands of tickets that we're not necessarily responsible for after the tickets are set up. Since you took away our ability to define which issues are relevant to us, it's become far more difficult for my team to do their day-to-day work, as they now have to sift through hundreds of Jira notifications that aren't relevant to them.

[Graham Douglas]

Need to bring back the ability for users to define which issues are relevant to them. For me I've got issues I'm watching etc notifying into Teams so I don't want them in email as well. But i can't switch off emails altogether as I do want an email if I'm assigned to a ticket or mentioned in a comment. This update has done the opposite to 'take control of my inbox'!

[ASQA]

I'm not a big fan of the update, especially the loss of the old options. For me, it's essential to be notified about my own changes in a ticket, particularly for documentation purposes. The solution "in a few weeks" is unfortunately far too long.

[Spencer Haven]

Seems like I'm not the only one who feels this way, but I agree, this is not an improvement. I am a BA and write a lot of user stories across a lot of projects. Now, anytime an issue is moved, I get an email since I'm the reporter, even though I don't want an email notification. Please let users define what they want to get notifications about themselves. 

[Tomáš Vojvoda]

I have just summarize the change for our company like this:

They have switched the logic from "choose the relation to tickets you want to get notifications for" to "choose the activity on tickets you want to be notified about (and we determine which tickets are related to you ourselves)"

The issues I have with this change:

1. You did not notify us about this change of logic, I see it more important to notify about change than about any new feature.
2. Everyone (namely ticket creators like Project/Product owners, Architects, Analysts) will get notifications on changes to all tickets they created (for others) -> SPAM
3. Why did you go from 1:N to N:1 instead of N:N ? Why take away the option for a user to choose which tickets are relevant to him/her? -> this is my suggestion, give us back the ability to determine which tickets we want to get notified about for ourselves.

Kind regards,
Tomas

[Robert Rogers]

Hi @Adarsh Singh Maheshwar -

I've found the rollout of this feature very confusing.   

The initial rollout had checked all options for notifications,  which resulted in a flood of garbage/clutter emails for several days until I figured out what was going on.

But even now, it seems buggy:

• I have only one notification option checked: "You’re mentioned in a comment"  (for Email only). Nothing else is checked -- and I have no other "project-specific" notification settings;
• Yet I am still receiving email notifications for JIRA status changes (such as "Not Started -> In Progress") which I absolutely do not want.  I'm getting 10-20 of these per day and it draws time and focus away from more important emails. 

How can this situation ^^ not be a bug?  The feature is not following its own UI controls.

Has anyone reported this bug yet?

Please make the feature obey the UI controls that you've given to users. 

To receive status change emails - or any other notification - when I've clearly only checked "You’re mentioned in a comment" seems completely wrong.

[Petra Kirsi]

Did I understand the stack correctly:
1. Admin can set a notification scheme
2. Can be filtered by user notifications
3. Can be over run by project custom notification settings (this is still user specific).

I personalised my default settings and project custom settings. I still receive email about every activity on the ticket, because I am the reporter.

I am a product owner - I create a lot of tickets on behalf of clients and devs. This change to notifications results in complete flood of spam (!). I do not want to stop emails all together because some tickets wait for a client for long a long time. I need emails when I am mentioned.

As of now there seems to be nothing I can do. If the admin changes the default notification scheme it means it changes for everyone. Could I work around it by telling the admin to change the scheme and confirming the clients have chosen to automatically watch tickets they create - or does Jira's assumption that reporters want everything rule over the scheme still?

Is there any plan of returning the control for what ticket is relevant to me?

[Kevin Rigard]

The new setting are not holding, I have removed every setting possible and I am still notified when any change happens to a ticket. How can we change this? 

Does the default notification scheme OR the personal settings control the email notifications? Getting emails for too many things, when the permission we did have set up were working fine. 

We need more communication on these changes and how they may impact existing setups 

[Trudy Claspill]

@Adarsh Singh Maheshwar 

Can you provide more information on the how the default Notification events correlate to the options in the new Notification preferences? Why is a Status change not correlating to the Issue Edited notification preference?

[guillet_marion]

I agree with comments above.

As project leader, owner of most of the tickets in the Jira project of my team, i recieve incessant email notifications. As @Robert Rogers I tried to unchecked every event except  "You’re mentioned in a comment" but I stille receive an email notification everytime the status of a ticket change.

I opened this issue but it as been considered as "solved" given that the subject is raised here.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/incessant-email-notifications-from-Jira/qaq-p/2651205

[Matthew Eastel]

Hello, I set up most of our teams stories and am consequently the reporter. I used to be able to turn off notifications based on this status, but this has been removed. This is causing problems as I now receive updates on every ticket I set up! I'm sure I'm not the only one. Please can this option be reinstated. Thanks, Matt

[Sean Lively]

An option to prevent notifications when the sprint changes would be great: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-78833

[Morten Lund]

As someone who is the reporter of hundreds of tickets that I don't interact with or solve myself. This watching+assignee+reporter grouping is absolutely insane.. If I want notifications to issues that I'm watching or assigned to, I'll have to receive EVERYTHING that I'm also a reporter on. For the love of god, do you even use your own product?