Bug: Notification emails stop, and "Email notifications are off" appears, with 46 emails

[Kevin Meboe]

For the past two days, I've seen the "Email notifications are off..." message, indicating we've exceeded our daily number of emails for the free tier. I confirmed with our system administrator that our organization received only 46 Jira emails today. 

According to https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-email-notifications/ , the daily limit is 100 emails.

Our organization is slowly growing, and we will probably upgrade plans in the future. But this is a very disruptive bug, and makes me wonder what other surprises might be lurking.

Let me know what we can do to help track down this bug.

Thank you!

-Kevin

[Kevin Meboe]

Hi @Trudy Claspill,

I'm not aware of a way to see how many emails were sent on the Jira side. An article mentioned "Jira Service Management", but it doesn't look like we have that with the free tier.

All of the Jira users are in our organization. Our system administrator did an audit of our system to determine how many Jira emails were received by our team, and that's where the number 46 came from.

-Kevin

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Kevin Meboe 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

The Email Notifications limit applies to all outgoing emails. That includes the notifications from Notifications configurations in projects and emails sent from Automation Rules.

Also you made this statement:

I confirmed with our system administrator that our organization received only 46 Jira emails today. 

Did you mean to say your administrator indicated on 46 emails were sent?

[Kevin Meboe]

Sorry -- I tried to reply directly to you, and instead it looks like I accidentally created a new answer. That's what I get for responding on my way to bed...

[Trudy Claspill]

No problem.

Your administrator's audit of how many emails Jira received unfortunately doesn't have anything to do with the Email notification limit.

According to documentation provided by Atlassian, on the Jira Free plan there is a limit of 100 notification emails per day.

The Automation Rules Service Limits also mention a 100 emails limit.

According to an answer from an Atlassian Team member on this post, that limit is actually across the Jira instance and includes both Notifications and emails sent through Automation rules. 

I'm not finding information about any method to get a report of all the emails sent by a Jira Cloud system.

Each project has a configuration for when and to whom emails should be sent when different events happen related to issues. By default in a Free subscription the Notification configuration that is applied will notify the Reporter, Assignee, and All Watchers of an issue for multiple events such as Issue Assigned, Issue Updated, Issue Closed. If you have a lot of activity happening with your issues this can easily cause the notification limit to be exceeded.

Here is a link to Notification configuration information for Company Managed projects. Note that only Jira Administrators can change these configurations.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-notification-schemes/

If you have Team Managed projects, the Project Administrators for those projects can change the notification configuration for each project they administer, through the Project Settings > Notifications screen.

You could examine your notifications configurations and change them to reduce how many emails are being sent.

You could also ask your Jira Administrators to review all the Automation Rules that have been created to see which ones are sending emails, if any, and how many emails they are sending and how often.

[Kevin Meboe]

Thank you for your reply, and for helping me work through this.

We have two automation rules that send emails. Both are limited to one specific project that has very little activity. It would have generated fewer than 5 emails on the day in question. Regardless, the audit included these emails in the count.

"Your administrator's audit of how many emails Jira received unfortunately doesn't have anything to do with the Email notification limit."

Can you clarify this? Since the sent emails only go to our administrator, why would the number of sent emails not correspond to the number of received emails? Are you saying some of the emails sent by Jira got lost in transit? This is not something we've seen in the past, and is another red flag if it is suddenly happening.

[Trudy Claspill]

I think I misunderstood your statement.

When you said the admin found 46 emails received I read that to mean that Jira had received 46 emails from users, such as their replies to Jira notifications. 

Now I understand that you meant the admin was trying to count how many emails had been received by users where the emails were sent by Jira. 

I apologize for the confusion and my incorrect statement as a result.

How did your admin get the count of emails, exactly? I'm not aware of any report of that information, so it would be helpful to understand the process your admin used.

[Kevin Meboe]

Gotcha, no worries. My original post may not have been as clear as I intended.

As to your question, we are on Gmail for business, and it's easy for our administrator to do a search: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2618874?hl=en 

He searched for any emails coming from our Jira site (jira@chillc.atlassian.net) as well as from the general "mail-us.atlassian.net" address that Jira is using. That is how he found the 46 emails that our users received (to be more technical, this was the count of "delivered" emails, whether or not somebody received/opened them).

Just to be thorough, I also asked him to find any emails from any sender that had "JIRA" (case insensitive) in the subject. That number came back as 36.

Let me know if you have any other ideas, or if you know of a way to escalate this bug to customer support somehow.