How can I manage email notifications as a user?

[Pim]

Jira send me a awful lot of email notifications. 

I expected to be able to be able to make an adjustment in my settings to configure this to a more relevant email stream. But I couldn't find how to do this. 

E.g. I'd like to receive an email when I'm mentioned and when a ticket is assigned to me. But no more emails when anyone has made an adjustment to ticket etc.. 

I have no admin rights, I just want to change this for me as a user. 

How can I do this?

[Bhushan Nagaraj · Accepted solution]

Hi Pim,

Modifying email notification settings for a project is a system administrator function. You will have to reach out to your admin and suggest modifying it to better suit your requirements.

Alternatively, you can setup a filter on your email.

As a user, there are some changes you could perform to your profile and email notifications in JIRA. These are documented at https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracoreserver073/managing-your-user-profile-861257126.html#Managingyouruserprofile-Managingemailnotifications

Cheers

Bhushan

[Pim]

Thank you Bhushan, I appreciate your answer. Unfortunately not the solution I hoped for though... Too bad JIRA gives so little flexibility for users regardi such an important topic. It would help JIRA too if people would read emails so the algorithms don't mark it as spam. 

So, Hopefully this'll improve in the near future. Thanks and kind regards...

[Arthur Mack]

Pim, as a JIRA admin I soon pruned down the JIRA notifications as I got so much Xitching from users. There are many good topics on this subjesct. Maybe you should point this out to your Admin!

[Pim]

Thanks Arthur, I will search my admin (I'm just a PO from a client within the JIRA structure of our digital agency) and see if he can make changes for me. 

[Piotr Zolnierek]

Totally dissappoint to be spammed to death by jira... 

[Richard Lalancette]

Wow, this is crazy... this is some very basic notification control any other application would give to the user...

[Neutrino_Sunset]

I would swear that modifying your email notification preferences did not used to be an admin function. I used Jira years ago and I used to be able to modify my email notification settings.

Now we are using a cloud hosted Jira instance and although there is a button for modifying your user settings there is literally nothing useful in there that you can adjust.

It's shockingly bad.

[michelle.miller]

The assumption here is everyone in an organization wants to be notified in the same way -- with the additional assumption that people should be trying to manually change this through their email client if they don't like it. A bad assumption followed by a worse assumption. Why would I want to risk missing an important notification I accidentally filtered, when I could have had an accurate filter integrated with the actual notification source?

[Alex Adams]

The reality is that in many (most) large organizations, the Jira admins are enterprise wide and thus don't have the time or the desire to fine-tune the notification settings on a per-project basis. In my organization, there is a single team of Jira admins, and any project team who desires any change to the Jira configuration must fight the bureaucratic battle to get their change approved. Requests to change the email notification settings are such low priority that they will be ignored. Atlassian can blame this on my organization, but the reality is that many large orgs operate this way.

Atlassian can either accept this reality, and provide the desired functionality for users to modify their own notification settings, or continue to ignore the reality and continue to spam their users to death.

At the time of this writing, I have created a "Jira Spam" email folder that contains over 1000 emails from just the past three months alone. 

[Bhushan Nagaraj]

@Alex Adams , if you are running our Server edition, Jira Software 8.0 released Batched Notifications feature that you may find helpful. Please take a look at the documentation at https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-8-0-x-release-notes-957981626.html#JiraSoftware8.0.xreleasenotes-emails

[Neutrino]

I've done the same thing and created a folder for Jira spam. The situation is ridiculous, the total lack of any configurability makes the entire notification system utterly pointless.

If what you are going to implement is going to be this pants, why bother wasting the dev time on it in the first place? You'd be better off spending the dev time on something that you're actually going to do a decent job of.

[Thomas Gerencer]

Yes, I too suffer from this. I get probably 30 emails per day when people on the team move cards around. I only need the emails where someone makes a comment on one of my cards.

Jira development team, please give me an option to choose whether I want to be notified about updates or comments or both!

This would save me soooooo much time deleting unwanted emails! :)

[nuno.f.pereira]

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but you could learn something with Azure DevOps: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/notifications/howto-manage-personal-notifications?view=azure-devops&tabs=preview-page%2Ccurrent-page

[Michelle]

It's incredible that it's been 4 years 5 years since Atlassian posted this, 2 years 3 years since I commented on it, and I still get upvote notifications because we still don't have any decent notification controls

Edited 2021 and 2022

[James O'Brien]

Such a low signal-to-noise ratio, just means all notifications get treated as spam. What's the point?

[Anne Mari Nedevska]

This is still an issue - users are drowning in notifications!

We are facing a problem in Cloud now with users turning their email notifications off because they are overflooded with add-on notifications. E.g. a person signs and issue and even though the person's settings are set to not getting notifications for his own actions, he gets notified because it is an add-on that is making the action and comment and the vendor is not able to fix this because Jira does not distinguish between real person users and system users.

Please upvote this issue if you agree:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-62640 

[Avigail_Manheim]

Navigate to Personal Settings (On the bottom of the blue sidebar on the left, click on the icon that has your initials or avatar > select "Settings")
From here you can adjust what emails you get. 

Here is the documentation from Jira that explains what the various email notification options are once on the Personal Settings page. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/manage-your-jira-personal-settings-952598541.html

[Avigail_Manheim]

Note that you need to select "Setting" under Jira, not "Account Settings" - See yellow highlighting in the image. (Though if you do select Account settings, it is possible to navigate to the same place by going to products > and clicking on the name of your instance under Jira Settings)

[Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_]

Hi Pim,
There is a great solution by using Email Notifications Digest add-on that enables JIRA users to group JIRA notifications and send them as a digest at a scheduled date/time.
You will get a single digest email with the updates specifically for you. All updates are grouped by issues and you can easily track who made each update.
It will save your time and a lot of nerves and peace of mind. You can keep a bird’s eye view on important issues and not distract many times during the day.

How it works:
Once Email Notifications Digest is installed and configured, each user in the system will start receiving the digest of recent JIRA updates at date/time configured by the user).

You can configure:

• time
• schedule
• number of updates
   

All recorded actions are in the digest:

• Create new issue all issues types are supported
• Updates to an issue all modifications made in issue fields:
  1. standard fields (description, summary, component, affects/fix versions, issue assignee/reporter, due date, attachments etc.)
  2. custom fields (labels, planned start/end dates, user picker, group picker, check boxes etc.)
• Log Work
• Comment to an issue (add / update / delete comment)
  If the user is not allowed to see a comment due to visibility level restrictions (comment cannot be visible to JIRA group user is part of), the record will not be sent in a digest.
• Issue State change (start progress, resolve, close etc.)
• Move an issue
• Convert an issue to task / sub-task
• Delete an issue

 Hope that I helped!

[Arthur Mack]

Nataliya, any plans for a cloud version?

[Pim]

Thanks Nataliya for your extensive answer. I appreciate it! 

I'm enjoying a holiday now, will dive deeper into this later on. But this add-on sounds pretty good. However I think there are certain notifications that I would like to receive immediately and just mute others. And it seems that this digest mail would maybe not fit the purpose best for me. Will see what works best in the near future, thanks for letting me know! 

[Kara Sheil]

Is there a solution for those on the Cloud service? I still only see the server version of Email Notifications Digest still after the last comments were posted.

[Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_]

Hi @Arthur Mack, @Kara Sheil

Currently, Email Notification Digest is available for Server version only. 

Thanks,
Nataliya

[Daniel Anderson]

Any Idea if you will have a cloud version at some point?

[David Rodriguez]

Why couldn't JIRA allow users to manage e-mail notifications similar to Confluence?   I believe this is what's asked for and needed for JIRA

Confluence Support: Email Notifications

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/email-notifications-145162.html?_ga=2.161482549.842865063.1548889236-1173795885.1534361934

[Arthur Mack]

SInce JIRA is task (issue) driven rather than just reading a page for information or editing purposes I don't think they should have the same kind of notification scheme. If users decided to opt out of certain JIRA notifications then no work would get done!

[Karin van den Berg]

I respectfully disagree Arthur. By receiving notifications of every single change on a ticket you've once interacted with (worklog, status change, added to sprint, etc etc), people end up ignoring the JIRA email notifications altogether. I see on my JIRA dashboard that the notifications there (bell in the lower left) splits notifications by "Direct" and "Watching". Direct only includes those where I am mentioned, assigned, that sort of thing. Those are the ones I would want to receive by email because those actually require my attention! Now I am tempted to just archive each and every one of JIRA's emails because it is too much. Simply having the option to choose between direct notifications by email or all would be perfect for me.

[Jesse Snyder]

@[deleted] I completely agree. My team has been having a bad issue of not seeing mentions and therefore not replying to questions asked on tickets. When you get so many emails, everyone ignores them! I know I do. I would love to have more advanced options per user that could be over-ridden at the project level if admins want to ensure every user is getting a specific type of email.

I'm looking at the Jira board a lot throughout the day. I don't need notifications about every single update. I would love to get emails when my name is mentioned or someone left a comment though.

[LeonM]

Agreed. Even a simple daily digest of ticket edits would be helpful.

While the new batching email notifications functionality (https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjira/jira-8-0-beta-release-notes-962954699.html#Jira8.0BetaandRCReleaseNotes-batching) might be really helpful if you have someone who edits a ticket 2 words at time, it does not go far enough to get rid of the dreaded "JIRA spam".

Requiring users to setup email filters or the org to purchase an add-on for something that's been repeatedly requested for years is frustrating.

[Kara Sheil]

The batching feature - only for installed instances or for Cloud too?

[Arthur Mack]

Get your JIRA Admin to turn of notifications for every update on an issue. As an Admin that is one of the fist things I do is to prune down notifications to a bare minimum and get the users to use @mentions.

[age spets]

Hi tried to find answer here. Its easy to turn off now, but how do we get these notifications within Jira?

[Leanne Priest]

..

[Joe Pitt]

notification schemes are designed to be setup for project roles, assignee, reporter, watcher, or groups not individual users.

[Arthur Mack]

While that is true the deafualt notification scheme is way to much for any users, every time an issue is even modified you get a notification.

[Joe Pitt]

I agree, but it often has to be a compromise from those that want everything (I've had those) and ones that just want open and closed.

[Arthur Mack]

Yes indeed, it ends up being a comprimise and you cannot please everyone.

[Jarl Øystein Samseth]

This indicates that Jira should let each user decide their own notification settings, which easily solves the problem of compromise. That's how websites and others solve it, and so should Jira.

[Joe Pitt]

However, JIRA is a tool to manage a COMPANY's projects. So management should have a say in how they want people notified that can't be overridden by individual users. 

[Jarl Øystein Samseth]

Then Jira should give the managers the opportunity to give their employers freedom of choice if the managers want that.

[Joe Pitt]

But it doesn't. You can submit a request for change and if enough people vote it may happen. Have you tried floating the idea of what notification you want to see if everyone else does? Most places I've worked people want assigned to me, mentioned, closed to the reporter and nothing else. Depending on issue type there may be some more milestone events that certain roles would want notification on. And almost no one wants notification when they take action.

People need to understand this is a COTS product and won't meet everyone's desires. If a COTS product doesn't meet a critical need or desire you should select a different product or look into writing a plugin to add the feature if a supported one isn't available. 

[Leanne Priest]

Hi Joe, You say that management should have a say in how they want people notified that can't be overridden by individual users, however as a user you can disable notifications which completely overrides admin/management's decisions on notifications... Users should have the option to configure notifications as they see fit if the global ones don't - different users of the system have different needs, I don't think a one size fits all approach is appropriate here.  I am also sure there are many admins/managers out there that could do without the hassle of being tapped on the shoulder by everyone complaining about this limitation! I am now going to search for an existing change request to vote for; if there isn't one already I will certainly be creating one!

[Joe Pitt]

You can only disable notifications for updates you make. If you make them you logically don't need an email telling you what you just did. 

[Arpit Tambi]

Hi @Pim ,

If you are the admin or site admin you can control over the notification that you are receiving. 

So here are the steps to modify your current notification scheme-

Go to Project setting -> Notification scheme -> Edit notification

AND YOU ARE DONE :)