Jira Notifications Hub EAP: What's changed?

[#1]

New Jira Email Notifications EAP

This article is only relevant to customers who opted in to the early access program (EAP) for Jira’s new email notifications experience. Based on the success of EAP, the feature should be generally available to all customers early 2024.

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Hey there!

We’re pleased to announce exciting improvements to the way you configure your Jira email notifications. To get started, ensure you have enabled email notifications so you can get notified on important issue activity.

 

What's changed?

When you go to your Personal settings page, it will now open a navigation side bar with two options.

• General is where your usual personal settings are located.

• Notifications is the new home for all your Jira notification settings.

Feedback was telling us that 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.

Previously, you were notified about all issue activity for relevant issues. but you were able to configure what issues you considered relevant by choosing to get notified about issues that:

• You’re watching

• You’re assigned to

• You’re the report on

• You’re mention on

• You’ve made changes to

The new experience allows you to select 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 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 have in the new Notifications page in you Personal settings.

Types of issue activity	Details
You’re assigned to an issue	When this setting is off, users will not receive emails for when their team mate has assigned them to an issue.
An issue is deleted	When this setting is off, users will not receive emails when a relevant issue is deleted.
An issue is edited	When this setting is off, users will not receive emails when a relevant issue has had its field edited.
Someone makes a comment	When this setting is off, users will not receive emails when a new comment is made on a relevant issue.
A comment is edited	When this setting is off, users will not receive emails when a comment is edited on a relevant issue.
A comment is deleted	When this setting is off, users will not receive emails when a comment is deleted on a relevant issue.
You’re mentioned on an issue	This option cannot be configured. You will always receive a notification if someone @ mentions you on an issue.

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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!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this article @Eric Zheng  - looking forward to seeing this to GA.

I think "Learn more about how this works here" should have a link?

[Victoria Grigson]

I received this update today. Frustratingly, all the notifications defaulted to 'on' - I'd got mine pared down to exactly the ones that I wanted, and then this morning got a dozen emails that I didn't need. I also can't work out how to disable the notification when someone changes the status on a card, which I definitely don't need. It's early days but so far this is a significantly poorer customer experience for me.

[Hi-Tech Business Hub]

We receive applications from clients through a bot, and it is very inconvenient for us when notifications do not arrive to the email address from which the application was created, since the manager works with this address(

[iotim]

I'm still getting notifications for things that are turned off on the default scheme and my personal notifications.  i only want notified when i'm tagged.  is that not possible anymore?

[atarab]

I have the same problem as @iotim . A few members of my team reached out that until now they only got notifications when they were mentioned in a comment (they work on a very busy project with many team members, so this makes it more manageable), and suddenly started getting emails regarding everything. 

I tried to help them configure their settings so they will only receive emails when mentioned again, but so far with no success. 

Any advice on how we can achieve this using the new settings tool?

[Trudy Claspill]

@Eric Zheng 

I have two pieces of feedback, specifically related to the deprecation of the Notification Helper.

1. This was not included in the weekly Cloud Changes documentation. I strongly feel this should've been called out there.
2. The recommendation to use the "Login as another user" option to check a user's email settings is available only to Site Admins (in original user management) and Org Admins (in centralized user management). But the Notification Helper was available to Jira Administrators. So this makes it more difficult for users who are only Jira Admins to self-manage their instances.

[Kamlesh Rao]

I realize the urge to change and freshen things up, but notifications were one place that was mature and did not need changes.  

Especially around notifications being dropped - i.e initiators of updates/edits on the ticket are not notified of their own changes via email.  Several folks are lamenting on it and we had a use case for it that now is broken.  

Ideally, if there was a way to toggle that it would have been the best way rather than outright drop that notification.  

[Nick Maskell]

Jira team I am so confused. I am now getting 30 junk emails a day for status changes in amongst the emails I actually want to receive (when people `@` me). This is a bug, not a feature. Email notification are now completely unusable to me and now important information is being lost in a mass of meaningless emails I never asked for.

Please fix this bug. 

[Nick Maskell]

If you, like me, are getting too many emails from when status changes with this new update, please vote here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-83337

Somebody goofed up.

[Gregory Buchanan]

Really silly to remove the Notification helper. Rather improve it.

[Stefano Ghirardini]

Removing of the Notification Helper was a very poor choice, now I cannot check why a notification is not sent to a user and I cannot use the "feature" of logging in as that user because with the SSO configuration it does not work.

[SARAVANAN BASKAR]

Bad decision to remove the notification helper, one of my user is impacted with Jira notification mails not getting delivered to him for almost 4 months, so the only option is to contact the support team which is really bad.

[Alex Hall]

I found at least one article that still references Notfication Helper. Your team should scrub all your knowledge base articles to either remove reference or acknowledge that this once existing feature no longer exists. I just wasted 20 minutes of my sanity trying to find this feature and finding articles that reference it only added to my confusion.