Introducing anti-spam limitations to the Bulk Email feature in Jira

[#1]

Hi Everyone,

We would like to share an update concerning the Bulk Email functionality that is currently available to all Jira customers. This feature available at Settings → System → Send Mail allows Jira admins to send out Bulk Emails to groups of Jira users.

The Atlassian anti-abuse team has received numerous complaints of misuse where spammers are using this functionality to send spam emails to Jira users. From our investigations, we have seen that the modus operandi of the spammers is to create free Jira tenants and then leverage the bulk email feature to send out large volumes of spam emails to users.

To prevent this feature from being further abused, we have decided to add certain security/anti-spam limitations to the bulk email feature.

1. Outgoing Mail Kill Switch - Jira has an outgoing mail switch that can be used to disable all outgoing emails from Jira (Settings → System → Outgoing Mail). Earlier the bulk mail functionality did not respect this switch. The bulk email functionality will not be disabled if the Outgoing Mail option is disabled.

2. Bulk Email for Paid tenants only - The bulk email functionality will no longer be available for customers on Free tenants and will now be a premium feature. If you are a Free tier customer and you wish to continue using the Bulk Email functionality, you will need to upgrade your license.

That’s all for now folks.

Thank you,

Arjoon Som
Sr. PM, Jira Cloud

[Martin Boehme]

1. […] The bulk email functionality will not be disabled if the Outgoing Mail option is disabled.

Why not? Wouldn't that make sense?