Filter subscription mail duplicates

Rumceisz July 23, 2012

Hi All,

many of our Jira users get duplicated emails from filters. The email follow each other in the same minute every time.

We tried to unsubscribe and then resubscribe, and also delete the filter and create a new one.

There are no test environment where the users would get emails.

It is 100% sure that the cause is in the Jira not in the mail server or outlook.

Can you please help?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Rumi

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 23, 2012

Do you have any duplicate email addresses?

Do you have any users duplicated indirectly and then included in mailing lists?

Do you have a test system that might be sending them out?

For example, here:

nic and nic.brough are two user accounts. They both have the email address nic@somewhere.com.

When they're both watching an issue, I get two emails, one for each account

When nic@somewhere.com is included in an email server group called "Jira Admins" which has an email address of jiraadmins@somewhere.com. Jira has a dummy account called "Jira admin" with that email. When Jira admin is assigned an issue that nic and nic.brough are watching, I get three emails

When I replicate that into the test system and forget to turn off the email server, I get another full set

Can you rule those scenarios out? And confirm that it's only subscriptions doing this? And tell us what authentication system you're using? (LDAP, internal, etc?)

Rumceisz July 24, 2012

Hi Nic,

thank you for your focus!!

Yes, all those questions I have investigated earlier just I didn't put it here.

My answers below:

Do you have any duplicate email addresses? NO, the user has just only 1 user account

Do you have any users duplicated indirectly and then included in mailing lists? NO

Do you have a test system that might be sending them out? YES we have, but the email sending function is switched off in TEST. And the user doesn't have any fiter subscription in TEST.

And tell us what authentication system you're using? (LDAP, internal, etc?)

This might be the problem root(?): we use 2 links for login to Jira - an internal which authenticates through iChain (Novell Access Manager) and an external which authenticates through Jira internal database.

It is also weird that the user created a new filter subscription with weekly 1 email report. In the first two weeks he got 1 email as normal but from the third week he got duplicated emails again.

Thanks for your help!

Rumi

Rumceisz July 26, 2012

Hi Nic,

have you got any idea related to this bug? We correctly checked each of your hints again.

We checked the log but there were no information related to the email sending. Is there any different file where are the infos related to email sending are stored?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Rumi

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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July 26, 2012

>Do you have any duplicate email addresses? NO, the user has just only 1 user account

That's not quite what I asked - I asked if the users email address was listed more than once. The accounts could be completely different

Anyway, no, I'm stuck really. The only time I've ever seen duplicate emails going out of Jira, it's been one of those three, or a dodgy hack in a plugin or core code (I'm assuming you haven't got any of those!). Jira simply doesn't duplicate email being sent to one of it's accounts, it sends once, and once only.

That's not to say duplicates don't appear by other means - email server maintenance causing re-sends, client rules etc. In fact, client rules are the second most common cause.

I asked about your authentication system because that could also be an issue - if you're using two and have duplicates between them, I can imagine that what Jira sees as a single account (which I am certain it is only sending a single mail to) could be being interpreted as more than one by your external systems and mailed twice. Pretty torturous to imagine how, but it feels possible.

For further information, I'd look at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Logging+email+protocol+details - you'll get a lot of logging, which I am sure will show Jira only sending mail once per account (bearing in mind that you may have duplicates in your 2 auth systems)

Florian Fahrenberger April 18, 2016

Sorry for bringing this up again, this thread seems really old. But I am running into the same issue and none of the suggestion I found online seem to be the problem. The reproduction for me in JIRA Core is simple: A user subscribes to a filter, it does not matter if the "Email this filter, even if there are no issues found" checkbox is ticked or not. Nobody else is subscribed to the filter, only one user with a single email address and no JIRA group or email list. He receives two subscription mails.

I turned on debug logging, but I only see the same message with the same subject and receiver being sent with roughly 2 seconds time difference, no error or warnings. The received emails and headers as well as the entries in the JIRA log are identical except for the message ID and timestamp.

Searching the user database (in JIRA as well as in the SQL database itself) shows only one user by that name and only one user with that email address.

I do connect an Active Directory for authentication, and I did edit and change the JIRA User Directory settings in the past, but the user name or email address in the AD never changed, although it may have come from different Active Directory entries in the User Management. But as I said, I can't find any leftovers of old versions in the JIRA instance or the SQL database.

Funnily enough, for one user the messages come in two different languages (once in German and once in English), but mostly the content is exactly the same.

Does anybody experience this as well and/or has an idea or suggestion where to look or what to do? I am slightly baffeled.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 18, 2016

Well, you've ruled out most of the things we looked at before.  Could you check what scheduled services you have?

The German/English thing might be a clue there - do you have any translation type stuff active or add-ons related to sending email?

Florian Fahrenberger April 18, 2016

I did not find anything suspicious in the scheduled services, here is a screenshot:

image2016-4-18 14:50:11.png

 

It was however very interesting to see that the filter subscriptions are cron-based, maybe I'll find out something this way. The list of subscriptions shows one error from a missing ID, but I don't think this can cause my problems:

 

image2016-4-18 15:0:40.png

 

I don't have any mail-related AddOns installed.

I also thought about the language hint. I never set anything regarding translation, by default the installer (Linux) set up 6 "Installed languages". If you log into JIRA and your browser language preference says "German" (my company is German, so this is very possible), all of JIRA will be translated to German, menus, descriptions and also notifications.

My best guess right now is that there is somehow an old leftover from this user in our JIRA instance. Like, he logged in while connected to one Active Directory, changed some things and stored his settings, then I added him via a different AD and he logged in again. Now his profile kind of features two different sets of preferences, sort of a ghost user that is not really visible but hidden behind the new user with the same name. Has something like this ever occurred?

Thanks for being so patient with me and this silly problem.

Florian Fahrenberger April 18, 2016

Some more info: The failed call is not listed in the normal dbo.filtersubscription database table, but apparently shows up in the dbo.JQUARTZ_TRIGGERS table as such:

image2016-4-18 15:16:40.png

Maybe that's a hint...? Maybe this entry also triggers all the SubscriptionManager runs? I usually wouldn't look into the database directly, but I am trying to find a ghost here. wink

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Jamil Rahimov
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July 15, 2020
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Ken Borgelt October 23, 2017

Adding a little late to the thread but an admin can get a list of everyone subscribed to a filter using the query found in this link: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-list-filter-subscription-of-an-issue-filter-in-jira-735773024.html

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