Update on Jira email notifications

[#1]

G'day Atlassian community!

My name is Abhinaya Sinha and I'm a product manager for Jira. I've some exciting news to share with you on Jira notifications. 

First, we're pleased to announce that you can now manage personal notification settings in Jira directly from any email that you receive from Jira.

Second, we've started work on: 

• ability to turn off/turn on all Jira notifications sent via email
• project level notifications for next-gen Jira projects

What has shipped

Manage your Jira notifications

At the bottom of any email sent from Jira, you will now see a "Manage notifications" link. Clicking on this link will take you to the relevant section of your personal Jira settings. Note, personal Jira settings can be accessed manually by clicking your profile avatar on the bottom left-hand side >  Settings. However, you will be able to directly get to it by clicking on "Manage notifications" link at the bottom of any email sent from Jira. 

From here, you can control the amount of email you get from Jira for 4 specific scenarios: 

• You’re watching the issue
• You’re the reporter
• You're the assignee for the issue
• Someone mentions you

By default, you'll get email updates for the above kinds of issue activity. But you now have the ability to control these directly from Jira emails. It is worth noting that these settings are your personal Jira settings. They apply uniquely to you, and only you, and for all your Jira projects. The images, below, visually depict a Jira email with "manage notifications" link as well as "email notification preference on your personal Jira settings page.

What is coming up

Ability to turn off/turn on Jira email notifications 

We are working on the ability for you to turn off/turn on all Jira email notifications. In addition to the 4 scenarios mentioned above, this includes all project-level notifications that might have been setup by your Jira admin. And just like 'manage your Jira notifications', these apply uniquely to you, and only you, across all of your Jira projects. However, there are some notable exceptions that this feature, when shipped, won't handle. These include: 

• notifications received from subscribing to Jira filters and dashboards
• Jira mobile app notifications 
• Jira Service Desk (JSD) customer notifications. Note JSD agent notifications are still included. 

PROJECT LEVEL notifications for next-gen projects

You might know that Jira admins can use notification schemes to customize notifications for Jira classic projects. However, notifications cannot be configured for Jira next-gen projects. We are excited to inform that we've started work to address this shortcoming. Once this feature is shipped, admins of next-gen projects will be able to configure who to notify (specific users) and what to notify them about (events/triggers). 

We, at Atlassian, are committed to improve the Jira notification experience and believe these features are important steps in that journey. As always, we'll be happy to receive any feedback and comments you might have. 

Thank you. 

Cheers,

Abhinaya

[Boris Berenberg - Atlas Authority]

What kind of feedback do Admins and users performing actions get about notifications becoming "unreliable" with this change?

[Abhinaya Sinha]

Hi @Boris Berenberg - Atlas Authority I'm not sure I understand your question. Could you please elaborate? 

[Boris Berenberg - Atlas Authority]

Users and admins have an existing expectation that "If I do X, then person Y gets an email notification". This introduces a change that this logic is no longer true. I am trying to understand what kind of UX/UI changes are going to be rolled into this new feature to help the person performing the action understand what notifications will be triggered.

[Olivia_Cohen]

I agree with Boris' concern :) The feature is cool, but as an Admin, is it possible to know the notification a user has deactivated?
Case 1: the user forgot he previously deactivated all notifications, the admin checks and does not see why the user does not receive notifications.
Case 2: an admin would like to make sure specific notifications are well received, can he?

[Marko Jansen]

None of these new options are useful imo. Ofcourse you need to be notified if you're following, assigned to, etc...

What WOULD be useful is condensing the sheer number of email notifications into a few summaries a day.

"The following issues have been updated:

- A

- B

- C "

It would be great if the frequency depended in the level of activity. If nothing much happened for a few days: send single issue notifications. If dozens of issues are updated daily: give users the option for hourly / daily summaries.

[Greg Ranz]

Would this override notification schemes if everything was turned off but they might be on in the notification scheme?  

[Samir Gupta]

Agree with Marko here. The feature where the user gets an option to control the frequency of emails every few hours/daily in a digest form would be much useful. Very often I get 100s of notifications in a matter of few hours, which leads of inbox getting completely flooded. This will help mitigate that issue. 

[Mark Hostetler]

I would second being able to batch emails in some way.

Being able to control which fields are displayed, like at ticket creation, would be incredibly helpful

[David Wuth]

I echo the concerns about users being able to turn off notifications, especially the @mentions. And, what is the point of being a watcher if you don't want notifications? 

I really like @Marko Jansen 's idea about being able to get a daily digest/summary, and being able to set a notification preference of individual notifications, or a daily digest/summary.

[Ellen Davnall]

@Boris Berenberg - Atlas Authority and @Olivia_Cohen - I know where you're coming from. But I think this feature's been built with users in mind who live their lives in JIRA and refer to the notifications panel within JIRA for their updates - i.e. the assumption is that you would only turn off email notifications if you have a habit in place of getting your notifications elsewhere. Speaking from experience, I don't think this is necessarily true - some people will do anything to get to Inbox Zero!

As you say, given that an admin may have system-level assumptions that an assignee (for example) will receive email notifications, it would be great if JIRA would warn you when a user has deviated from the system standard notification settings, so you can take a decision to follow-up with the user via a different channel if you think you need to.

It would also be good as an administrator to be able to disable the ability for users to configure some or all of these email notification types.  A company may have policies and processes that rely on email notifications, so allowing individuals to opt out could be problematic for them.

[Andrey Ginger]

That's wonderful!

🌳

[April Brotherson]

Is this available via Jira Cloud?  I'm not finding where I can adjust my settings in my profile nor within an link in an auto-generated email.

[Andrey Ginger]

Yes, bec tagged as jira-cloud, m8.

[Deleted user]

The idea that previously all users were both receiving and reading the notifications is a little naive. Pretty easy to set up GMail filters for example to send them all straight to the trash heap :D 

[Matthew Gaylen(OLD-facilitywizard.com)]

I want notifications of new things.  But if a person is working on a story I don’t want the intermediate email messages.   There should be a way to set it for one message per story every x amount of time.   

[Amy Stogdill-Bennington]

I agree with Marko and others in regards to having an option to "Batch" the notifications in order to reduce the abundance of e-mails  you may get for ONE issue with multiple changes within the same 10 minutes.  I have heard many people at my company create an e-mail RULE to send all Jira e-mails to a FOLDER - and sometimes forget to review them.  Kind of defeats the purpose of the e-mail notification, IMHO.

[Andrey Lutskevich]

Yeaaaaaah! Thank you!

[Pedro Morais]

+1 for the suggestion to batch notifications (in general, not just via email) and for the concerns around users disabling notifications without anyone else being made aware of this.

I often get multiple notifications about the same issue in quick succession because someone has done the following things: assigned the issue to me, posted a comment and mentioned me in that comment. That's 3 notifications for what is essentially one event, i.e. "I've progressed the ticket and I'm making you aware of that".

I think Next-Gen projects already do this to an extent, but it would be great if this were rolled out more widely.

As Marko said, I don't see the point of these new features. Of course I'll want to be notified in all four scenarios. While I appreciate Ellen's point, does anyone really rely completely on the notifications panel? Unlike an email notification, you only get a snippet of information about what's changed in the ticket and that's probably not enough to decide if you should act on it or not.

[Olivia_Cohen]

Agreed @Ellen Davnall , some users use the notification panel. 

+1 for:  it would be great if JIRA would warn you when a user has deviated from the system standard notification settings, so you can take a decision to follow-up with the user via a different channel if you think you need to.

+1 also for @Marko Jansen idea, that might have been the first solution to apply :) IMO it would solve 90% of the complaints about email notifications.

[Aaron Meyers]

I have to say that it's super confusing that neither the JIRA email that drove me here, nor the blog follow the instructions you've outlined here. 

The email about this blog post doesn't have a "Manage notifications" link. 
The blog has its own profile and its own "Manage settings", which are different from JIRA. 

My first inclination was to click where I'm reading, since I see a user avatar in the top right. Instead I had to go to my teams JIRA, then follow directions there.

Might be smart to consolidate all of these so we don't have 5 different things that work differently.

[Deleted user]

Will there be an option to turn off notifications within Jira itself (the ones that appear in the Bell icon)?

[Zoltan _Yevhenii Dyachenko_]

It would be nice to see "turn off sprint update notifications"

[Peter Clark]

I just want a daily digest of all categories.

[Nick Bartlett]

Thank you!