Get email notifications for new JIRA issues?

Christopher Orr May 20, 2014

Is it possible to configure my JIRA account such that I receive an email for each new issue in a given project?

I see that JIRA admins can create notification schemes, but that seems unwieldy and a waste of admins' time if they're the only one who can ever make any changes:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Creating+a+Notification+Scheme

Can users set this up themselves?

I discovered that it's possible to create a search looking for issues in a certain project, using some crazy syntax ("created > -Xm") to find only those which were created in the last X minutes, save that search, then add an email subscription to that, sending emails every X (or fewer) minutes. But that seems a bit overly-complicated for most users...

5 answers

18 votes
Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)
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August 27, 2015

There is a way to do this that does not involve admin rights, which can be quite handy in many cases.

Create a new filter created >= -1h and save it. After this click details, Subscriptions and add a new personal subscription to this filter, one that would run every hour.

You can pick a different period of time, the lowest value possible being 15 minutes.

Screenshot 2015-08-27 14.08.54.png

If JIRA is configured to give you access to groups, you may even be able subscribe an entire group to these notifications.

Filter subscriptions are a very powerful feature in JIRA, one that quite often goes unnoticed.

Christopher Orr August 27, 2015

I'm aware of this — I mentioned in my question! But it's not particularly intuitive, and is probably over-complicated for many users to set up. Why can't there just users just opt-in on the project page?

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Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)
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August 27, 2015

I totally agree with you that is not intuitive at all. But if you want an intuitive option, you would have to raise a feature request on https://jira.atlassian.com

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Perry Miranda December 8, 2015

I think a 'Watch This Project' feature would be ideal which sends the watcher email notifications every time any ticket is created, updated, and deleted. Would also be nice to receive email notifications when new fields and field values are added, updated, or deleted within the watched project. Similar to watching a Space in Confluence.

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Deleted user September 6, 2017

Honestly a good idea, but to get it realized we'd need to have it added as a feature request on https://jira.atlassian.com

3 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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May 20, 2014

You might want to talk to your administrators too.

It's perfectly possible to create a notification scheme that says things like "Create issue - send email to users in Role X". If you have an appropriate role, you can then get the project admins to add people into it - your system admins only have to make one change, and you won't have to bother them again. (I often create a role of "project notifications" and use that in the notification schemes for sending automatic global project notes without using it for anything else)

As Fabio says, it's worth looking at watchers. Again, you'll need to make sure your system admins have set "watcher" to be notified in the notification schemes.

Christopher Orr May 20, 2014

Can users add or remove themselves to/from a role?

Otherwise, if people want to subscribe/unsubscribe to new-issue notifications, they would presumably still have to bug the admin every time, which is what I'm trying to avoid.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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May 20, 2014

Absolutely not - that would leave you with zero security and control.

There's two things here, which I think you're muddling up.

First, there's *project* access. You don't want people adding themselves to projects willy-nilly, it's just wrong. You should always go through the project owners, there's no useful way around this.

Second, there's *issue* access. That's actually a doddle - use watchers (along with a notificiation scheme that says "notify all watchers on event X").

Except that "watch" doesn't work for "create" because you can't watch something that doesn't exist yet. To cover that, get the system admins to create a new role like "create notifications", and use it in the notification scheme (for "create issue" events only). Then your people will have to bug the project owners to be added into it, and they'll get ALL issue create notes.

You might also want to add the watchers field on issue create, that might help.

Like Pit Fischer likes this
Baptiste Mathus December 18, 2015

> First, there's *project* access. You don't want people adding themselves to projects willy-nilly, it's just wrong. You should always go through the project owners, there's no useful way around this. Where you're right is that it's up the "project administrator" to decide. But the thing is that project administrator could/should be allowed to *decide* that *anyone* can *add himself* to some specific group. Use case: in an opensource project with an open model (Jenkins), a new project has been created where basically issues can be handled by anyone willing to (and the users list continually grows up). Having admin to manually add the willing users creates unnecessary burden.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 18, 2015

No, you should not allow project administrators that right. Or, if you do want it, then chuck away your security and just let anyone into the project because you don't need groups any more.

Like Maneesha Syea likes this
Baptiste Mathus December 30, 2015

@Nic exactly! That's almost what we need! Glad you got it. We want admins to have very few specific rights and the projects be by default (almost) totally open (exception being for example the SECURITY project where potential CVE are reported). Anyone can create, assign, close, comment any issue, and so on. So as anyone is allowed to work on what he wants, it would definitely make sense to be able to be notified when new things are created to go process them. It would be a right to add *yourself* to a *group configured to be self-subscribable* (not by default, OK), just like on GitHub you can follow a project and receive notification of any new PR or issue even if you don't have any commit right on the project.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 30, 2015

Ok, so you don't need the groups then, as your users are allowed to do anything. Or, if you do lock the projects up, you can use "watchers" for the users to add themselves to watching the issues.

2 votes
Fabio Racobaldo _Herzum_
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May 20, 2014

Hello Bob,

just JIRA Administrators can setup a Notification Scheme.

A simple user could watch an issue (if he has privileges to browse the related project), and he automatically will receive all the notification defined for watchers into the Notification Scheme.

Hope this helps,

Fabio

Christopher Orr May 20, 2014

Sorry, I guess I don't understand this, or perhaps what "watchers" are.

I can watch issues in a project, and I get email notifications. But I want email notifications whenever a brand new issue is created in that project. So I don't see how watching an arbitrary issue would make that happen?

Nathan Jeffery March 7, 2017

Yeah, I want notifications for new issues and updates on all issues. This is one click on BitBucket. Jira's UX is terrible.

Like Alexander Kiraly likes this
1 vote
Monique vdB
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June 15, 2017

This is something I would also like to know how to do -- this post is three years old so I'm hoping there might be a better/more intuitive way to do this for a JIRA n00b. 

Yosh Mantinband July 30, 2017

Me, too.

Speaking as a relatively new user of Jira, what is the most effective way to lobby for this to be added?

Searching, I found this issue:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-45621

but it is closed as duplicate of this issue:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-4505

which is far more generic and far-reaching.

I would like to think that simply adding this feature might be done before the far-reaching solution is implemented.

Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
July 31, 2017
Jan Daniel Fourie July 30, 2018

@Monique vdB the link you posted contained the answer I was seeking in Solution 2. Thank you!

Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
July 30, 2018

@Jan Daniel Fourie hooray! This is the solution I'm using too :) 

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