How can users disable Jira email notifications?

Aaron Bramson May 3, 2016

I would like to disable email notifications for certain events in JIRA so that I don't get an email every time somebody creates an event for me, or comments on one, or completes one I created, or whatever other thing. 

Although I am supposed to be the admin of that project, I don't have the notification scheme option anywhere I can find.  But that's beside the point because users should OBVIOUSLY be able to set these options for themselves individually (because individual's preferences and ways of using JIRA differ).  It's so annoying that we will be switching to a new task management platform if we cannot disable these emails very soon.

Maybe the option exists and I can't find it, in that case please point me to the instructions. Or maybe Atlassian failed to provide this obvious feature, in which case please add this obviously desired feature. 

24 answers

41 votes
Michael Ehrich February 22, 2018

Well for me it is very obvious that users should make those settings for themselves.

 

In reality you can't force people to get those notifications if you want them to. Some may like them some may not. Some schemes may be good for some and for others they are not.

 

If you try to force them but not giving them the option to change it people will just add mail client rules to delete them and what is the point of sending 1000 of mails which nobody is going to read ?

 

So not giving the user the option to make their own settings is just working around the user needs and bad by design. And in the end it will not achieve anything just more addons or rules that filter those mails.. and just more data trash overall.

 

So please add this feature which you already had in Jira years ago.

avant5 May 9, 2018

This is what I'm going to do - I am not going to bother the admin about setting up filters, they have enough work to do already.

I get notifications on my phone and tablet, and don't need 50+ emails a day to delete, so I'm setting up Gmail with a straight-to-spam filter.  This doesn't help atlassian's score with spam reporting, but since they aren't giving me an option that's on them.

Like # people like this
Charlotte A. McKenzie December 18, 2018

Mark, Did this work?  I need to stop all of the email notifications. CAM

Like Михаил К likes this
Mark Greene December 18, 2018

Hi Charlotte, it did.

If you want to be nice, you could just have an email filter that sends them straight to trash - but since this is a deliberate "feature", I felt they deserved to have it marked as spam and then trashed.

Maybe a little overly-vindictive, but it's such a common sense thing to be able to disable, and the noise was driving me nuts.  My phone and tablet would "zing!" when notices on the JIRA app came up, and then the emails would follow.  When the weekly work list would be released, it would be dozens of issues they would release into the sprint all at once.

I know that deleting emails isn't a monumental thing, but it's still time, and in a busy sprint, it ends up being a lot of time logging into email and deleting emails I never wanted and would never read.  JIRA is supposed to help improve productivity, not shave minutes off my work time while I play email janitor.

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Anuj January 3, 2019

I am getting emails about tasks that I am not even concerned with.

Any one will have made even a comment on a ticket, I get an email when its nothing to do with me. I have my Home Dashboard and that's enough for me.

I thought this would be the most basic feature in jira dashboard to just turn off email notifications but apparently, there is not.

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Marcos Polanco February 8, 2019

This is manifestly broken functionality.

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Peter Nürnberger February 15, 2019

Same here. We just set up jira and I really like most of it. But if it isn't possible to disable these spammy email notifications, I am forced to do it like Mark and mark them as spam.

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Anuj February 15, 2019

I requested my company's Jira admin to disable email notifications for me and he was able to do it. I don't know how he did it but I am no longer flooded with emails I don't need.

Peter Nürnberger February 15, 2019

Gratefully my mail provider offers some custom spam rules services, so I can delete all incoming mails from jira with the subject starting with "[JIRA]". A notification settings area would be the more elegant way to do this, I guess.

Like # people like this
Benjamin Rood February 27, 2019

If Atlassian Cloud's pricing model wasn't so aggressive, truly nobody would use JIRA. It is a trash, bloated piece of garbage. On top of that (or, probably because of that) it's slow.

p.s. You guys do know that you can have a WYSIWYG editor *and* support inline markdown, right?

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Jim Murtha April 18, 2019

LOL I just got an email from JIRA for liking 2 comments. It's a never ending avalanche!

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Anuj April 18, 2019

My admin had kindly modified my email notifications. Unless someone tags me, I don't get emails which is perfect as the issues assigned to me are shown in my dashboard.

 

Now the emails I am getting are of this thread lol! How can I unsubscribe from this thread?

Like # people like this
Carr Oduro July 19, 2019

I wonder how your admin was able to do it?

Nick Cron October 3, 2019

If anyone here uses Slack you might find value in our Jira > Slack integration - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1219324/slack-integration-for-jira

1. It allows you to get notified in Slack (so you can disable these emails)
2. Each user controls what they receive by themselves
3. Notifications are batched up based on your preference to distract you less
4. You can reply, transition, edit, comment, etc right from the message

Check out the reviews to see what other people think.

Like Richard Scholtes likes this
14 votes
Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
September 13, 2017

There is a great solution to avoid the dozen JIRA email notifications - it’s an add-on Email Notifications Digest 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).

Configuration Page:
you can configure

  • time
  • schedule
  • number of updates

All recorded actions are in 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, checkboxes etc.)
  • Log Work
  • Comment to an issue (add / update / delete comment)
    If user is not allowed to see a comment due to visibility level restrictions (comment cannot be visible to JIRA group user is part of), 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
Deleted user January 19, 2018

Amazing. That's basically Trello awesome email notifications system for Jira. Why is this not included by default in the cloud version?

Please Atlassian you bought Trello so make it worth and just include this or at least tell us you're working on this issue!

Like Jo Wilkes likes this
Róbert Szabó February 6, 2018

Hi @Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_,

 

I have just tried out the Email Notification Digest, and my problem is that the plugin sends its digest e-mail besides the Jira built-in notification, so users get even more email.

https://activitytimeline.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/NDD/pages/48502637/Frequently+Asked+Q+A

"

Notification Digest and Jira notification emails

 

Q: Will I receive the email digest in addition to the default JIRA Notification emails or instead of them?

A: You will receive both: default JIRA notifications and digest.

You can setup a rule in your favorite email client to move notifications into a separate folder.

"

Do you find other way to configure it?

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Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
February 22, 2018

Hi Róbert,

Yes, you can turn off default Jira email notifications at JIRA Administration -> Projects -> Project -> Notifications page. 

Open "Actions" -> "Use a different scheme" drop-down and set "Notifications Scheme" to None. Repeat for each project.

In this case, you will receive digest emails from Email Notifications Digest only (per individual user's digest schedule). 

Oleh Vasyliv April 18, 2018

Hello!

Email Notifications Digest add-on has been upgraded to automatically disable Jira notification emails and send only digest emails with all updates.

This can be enabled/disabled at the add-on global configuration page:

image.png

Thanks,

Oleh

Petr Musil May 24, 2018

Aside it's paid plugin -- not available for "Cloud" means useless as always...

Like # people like this
Oleh Vasyliv May 24, 2018

Useless for Jira Cloud users (at the moment) not Jira Server ones

Valerii Galagan September 4, 2018

Can't believe Jira makes this "problem" for her users and then sells the solution - Email Notification Digest.. wtf!?

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peter October 30, 2018

I really unhappy about the "notifications" it is just spam in my inbox. And I cannot turn it off myself?

Like Josh Priollaud likes this
Richard Ryu January 30, 2019

Controlling JIRA e-mail notifications are a challenge. I'm not happy with it but have 3 potential workarounds to get around it.

1. If using outlook, create a JIRA folder and then create a rule that sends desired JIRA email notifications to the JIRA folder in your outlook. [same concept applies for gmail] 

2. If using teams or slack, configure the chat bot to create alerts after completing option 1 above.

3. [my current option] just let it flood your inbox... You'll get used to it :D. If it's really really important, it will find its way to you (from a mid-manager perspective... so might not apply for everyone)

7 votes
Tom McG May 23, 2017

This is just a "me too" here.  I'm a lowly user - not an administrator.  My coworkers make incremental changes to issues that are assigned to me (or that I'm tagged on or whatever) when they have time and are in the mood.  My InBox fills with 28 emails with little pink strikethroughs and rewordings.  But I'm working on something completely different.  In a week or three, I'll log in and see what my current to-do list is on this project.

Please provide a way for an individual user to say "No email notifictions for me, thanks!"

I've got a workaround in mind that should do the job for now, I hope!

Krishna June 5, 2017

One workaround for this can be, even though you are not the assignee, you might be in the watchers list for the issues. So removing yourself from watchers can work.  

search for the issues that you are watching using the JQL

watcher = currentUser()

this will return all the issues that you are watching right now. from the list, you can delete yourself from all the issues that you don't want to watch. 

Hope this works for you

-krishna

Like # people like this
5 votes
Nico Troia June 21, 2018

I really can't stand the amount of emails (and DINGs) I get during the day while I'm trying to work or sleep (while in different timezones and users are moving many tickets around). 

I don't want to bother the admin to change the scheme for everyone. I just want to change it for myself. Is this still not possible? 

I will try to create a gmail filter to automatically move these to spam, or read, and see if that helps.

Richard Ryu January 30, 2019

yeap... this is what most people are doing.

Like Mike Ellertson likes this
3 votes
ochiodo June 27, 2018

This is just disappointing. I prefer to use Slack to get notified by Jira so all E-Mails which are sent to me are redundant and are sent to spam (but others in my team prefer Mails). One could say it is against our philosophy to let individual users decide how they are notified. But its consequence is, that on larger projects with multiple teams and a single Jira admin, it results in very complex notification schemas. I refuse to believe that this is what Atlassian wants their customers to experience.

Edwin Aponte June 28, 2018

It seems like unless you're a developer or an administrator, JIRA makes it very hard to customize your experience. Why that's smart for what is basically a mainstream, all-purpose workflow tool is a mystery.

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Brent Engels August 1, 2018

Baffling why this is an issue at all.  The UX is bad.

Like chelsea_kane likes this
Flash_Sheridan January 31, 2019

Even though I’m an administrator, it looks like I can’t customize the experience for my users.  There seems to be only a project-level setting, not per user.  Some users do need to get such notifications, some do not.  I may have to remove one user as owner of a project to avoid spamming her.

3 votes
Meludia April 20, 2017

I am the adminstrator and I would like some of my colleagues get their notifications on Slack (because internals), and some on emails (because external).

How can I achieve that ?

 

Thank you

3 votes
Tibor Hegyi _META-INF_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
May 3, 2016

Aaron,

While I understand Nic's arguments and agree with them mostly, I know that reality may be different. In many cases I can see that teams do not rely on the notification emails, but history, activity streams and statuses in the issues. Lots of teams tend to ignore emails if there are many.

A good level of granularity in notifications can be achieved using Notificaiton Schemes in many cases, but sometimes it is still frustrating.

One alternative to fine grained notifications could be to use filter subscription. It delivers emails to you periodically containing issues matching a filter. Filter may be something like "Issues changed in the last hour". With an hour period, you'll get the changed issues without details in the email about what has changed.

Another alternative to the problems you mentioned is an add-on that provides what you need. It is called Bug Watcher Notifications

It allows you to configure your a JIRA project with a minimum or even without a Notification Scheme and let your individual users select their personal notification preferences instead. This includes selecting the individual event types they want to get notified on.

It also allows you to set up in-app notifications. Either in a self-service manner (see above), or using a Notification Scheme that will not deliver emails but in-app notifications.

The full list of features is available too. It is for JIRA Server only not for Cloud though.

Aaron Bramson May 5, 2016

That Bug Watcher does sound like the functionality I want, although unfortunately I'm using the cloud version. 

Currently I've just turned off all notifications, but I'd like for my developers to be able to turn them on for themselves if they want them for some reason (like maybe they are traveling or staying home and only working intermittently when there is need) without me needing to adjust the notification scheme in some fancy way. 

Imagine there is one person (who is on another team but sometimes does work for us on demand) who should get an email whenever THAT PERSON is the assignee, then probably I can get that done using roles somehow even if there isn't the functionality of "inform the assignee if the assignee is this person" in the overall scheme.  Essentially making each person their own role and setting the notifications for that role...but I don't know if that will even work the way I'd like. 

Or maybe I can set the scheme to email the assignee whenever the label "notify" is included, but I haven't tried that yet.  That's still not letting the person turn it off or on depending on their current needs, but that would satisfy some use cases that the schemes don't seem designed to support.

Thanks for your advice, I'll try some stuff and report back if I need further assistance/advice on getting it to work with my situation.

Andri Haraldsson March 2, 2017

Came across this thread and I have what seems like a similar use case to yours.  We turned off all notifications, but hook a message stream into Slack so there is a flowing stream of all activity.  We find it more efficient.  But in our case we mostly do new development, not so much maintenance.  So the number of tickets that are moved from desk to desk is small.

JIRA is showing it's age by relying on email and being dogmatic on how it should be used.  Most of the people I work with simply don't use email for these types of things anymore.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
March 2, 2017

Relying on email?  Rubbish, most of us turn most of the email off, and sit on the HipChat notifications.

2 votes
Pavel Kann July 16, 2019

Several years and still no solution for the users? What are we paying you money for?

2 votes
Rogério Munhoz July 10, 2019

I'm just commenting to say this is ridiculous

I don't want to choose if people get emails about stuff or not, nor I want to change that setting specifically for a project, nor I want Jira sending me useless emails.

So I went for the auto delete gmail filter, but that really annoys me that I have to do that.

Please, stop trying to force people to use this nonsense notifications schemes. That's just not what people want.

2 votes
RobertD June 27, 2019

Just a "me too" post. It seems crazy to me that this doesn't exist when the majority of people who use JIRA want it.

1 vote
Alex Adams December 14, 2020

Atlassian, why is it almost 2021, and I'm STILL having to sift through piles and piles of useless bullcrap spam from you every single day????

1 vote
necessidad December 10, 2020

I think I may have found a way around this.

  1. Disable auto watch on Profile ==> Preferences
  2. Bulk change to stop watching issues ==> Seach filter: watcher = currentUser() 
  3. Select all
  4. CLick on Tools ==> Bulk change ==> all issues select 
  5. Select All, Click next, select Stop watching
  6. Screenshot 2020-12-10 at 12.22.07.png
1 vote
Avigail_Manheim November 25, 2019

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 is helpful aside from not clearly stating how to navigate to your personal settings. 

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

Avigail_Manheim November 25, 2019

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)

Avigail_Manheim November 25, 2019

Navigating to Personal Settings.PNG

meliaxford October 27, 2020

Thank you!

1 vote
Wolfgang Rostek November 13, 2019

This is a me too. Almost my whole company is redirecting the Jira notifications to a kind of SPAM folder. I was fighting for a long time within the company to use it as a means for communication. But this thing is killing it without any excuse.

A similar thing like the checkbox on the Wiki pages is needed. The editor must have control to explicitely push, suppress or use defined project rules for notifying changes on an issue.

Otherwise communication via Jira has a major feature missing. 

Wolfgang Rostek September 10, 2020

As there is no solution activity here and I'm flooded by dozens of email notifications each and every day here my request.

I never added something to Jira but there should be some hooks available.

Is there a fairly simple way to ->

for the editor of a Jira
an accessible flag (or label etc.)
setting it true/false before saving the edits
this shall keep/suppress the email notification fired by this save event

thanks for any hint how difficult or impossible it would be

Wolfgang R.

1 vote
Sivaraman January 8, 2019

Go to  --> User profile --> under preferences set "Autowatch:Disabled" This should work i guess

Flash_Sheridan January 31, 2019

Atlassian has provided an option only for the least useful case.

Mike Ellertson March 20, 2020

I disabled this option weeks ago, but still receive many emails.  

1 vote
Alex Bierling November 28, 2018

Thanks Community for the long explanations. I understand that it's either not possible or working with a paid tool only. I'm not a coder, just COO and find it annoying how complicated  and nerdy Atlassian even simple things like user notification settings provides. 
My solution is simple marking Atlassian as spam (I'm anyways in the application for hours daily). 

Charlotte A. McKenzie December 18, 2018

Hello Alex,

 

Did you find an answer?  My Chief Technology officer wants to disconnect the notifications. He now has a digest, however. I have tried everything to remove those notifications.  

 

If you have a solution pleas share it with me., Please.

 

Charlotte McKenzie

Like Flash_Sheridan likes this
1 vote
Matthias Gaiser _K15t_
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
September 21, 2018

HI all,

I‘ve found this thread and immediately had to think about the announcements which were made at Summit that Atlassian will finally(!) release a feature like this in Jira 8.0. I don‘t know yet how useful it will be, but this is up to everyone to judge for yourself. They are also talking about that in JRASERVER-1369. You can see a screenshot how their batch notifications will look like in Stiltsoft‘s summit recap blog post. Unfortunately, I haven‘t found something on an official Atlassian page. Any other pointers are welcome.

Having said this, I know the thread originator was looking for a cloud solution. The corresponding ticket is JRACLOUD-1369. In this ticket Atlassian is looking for customers interested in working together with them to improve the notification behaviour.

I encourage especially the summit 2018 attendees to share additional details they might have.

Cheers,

Matthias.

0 votes
Andrew April 23, 2019

I do find a lot of settings in Jira very convoluted. But that being said, Notification Scheme setup is not hard to configure. You will need your admins to take care of this if you dont have access. Once its correctly setup (by default, jira likes to send notifications for everything), only related notifications will be sent (depending on your needs). I have it setup to only update relevant info, as to not waste a devs time reading emails for something that isnt related to their work.

Faisal Baig December 28, 2020

just fine this question and thought to share this:

email notifications can be turned off by clicking on Settings in top right corner and then select option Personal Jira settings

here you will be able to turn off all or specific emails notifications,

Like Emma Wright likes this
0 votes
mike April 17, 2019

If you use the "bulk change -> edit" from a query, there's the checkbox "Send mail for these changes", uncheck and no mail is sent.

Why can't this checkbox exist on the Edit dialog for the issues themselves!?  Easy peasy.  Uncheck so the piddly house-keeping changes I'm making don't bother the 5 people watching this issue for important stuff, like state change or comments.

And something like this should be a free plugin available to older versions of Jira so those of us that use it but don't have purchasing power can get it incoporated.  I get you folks have to make your nut, but my god, every issue brought up with your system is "Here's our marketplace, please pay $100's for a plugin to resolve the problem."  A lot of us are lowly engineers in mega-corp structures that don't have the power to do that.  We're not all Silicon Valley 5 employees startups y'know.

0 votes
Katie Minks April 11, 2019

As an individual user you can change a few notification settings, go to your icon in the upper right hand corner and in the preferences section, click the pencil in the right hand side of the screen.  There you can change if you are notified of any changes that you make and if you become a watcher automatically when a one of your tickets gets reassigned (you would then be notified of any changes on that ticket).

 

Those are the only two that users are able to change without altering the project notification settings or getting an admin to install a plugin that alters how notifications function.

0 votes
Alex Adams March 13, 2019

This is ridiculous that this feature doesn't exist. I am tired of getting emails for every single tag that's added or minor edit to my tickets. I don't need to know when someone adds a tag to a card. I don't need to know when someone changes the "Affects Version" section of a card. I DON'T CARE!!

The only thing I care about are comments on my cards. And nothing else! But I am tired of recieving 100+ emails daily, 99 of which are totally useless. And because Atlassian doesn't provide a solution for this, I'll have to mark them all as spam, and no longer be notified when someone actually provides a useful comment on a card I care about.

I know there has been lots of talk here about admins changing notification settings, but that's simply not feasible - I work for a massive organization with 500-1000 users of the same Jira instance. Any change to the notification settings will affect every single one of them - surely some of these teams need some of these notifications, so the default is of course to send every damn thing, and I don't blame the admins for making that decision.

Instead, the obvious solution would be that users should be able to opt out of recieving certain notification types - i.e. "Do not email me if someone adds a new label to my card". But instead, my only solution is to mark them all as spam - into the trash it goes. 

Matthias Gaiser _K15t_
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
March 13, 2019

I'd also like to control this as a user myself.

But in case you are still looking for a constructive solution, your system administrators could come up with meaningful notification schemes. I would recommend creating different notification schemes, e.g. like:

  • Notification about every change on an issue
  • Only Notifications about comments
  • ...

Every project administrator in Jira can then select from these notification schemes the desired one and make sure that the correct people are in the correct project roles so they get the notifications they need.

Cheers,
Matthias.

Btw: In Jira 8, finally Batch notifications were introduced which also should reduce your mail load.

0 votes
Emma Wright January 16, 2019

As Admins for our installation, our answer to this email spamming problem was to strip back the Notification scheme to a very basic level and apply to all projects, then insist that all users use filters and subscriptions to get the mails that they want from each project. 

This works well although we do get requests to add events from time to time, and have to train new users what to do, but its better than having everyone ignoring the mails. 

0 votes
Krishna June 5, 2017

 

One workaround for this can be, even though you are not the assignee, you might be in the watchers list for the issues. So removing yourself from watchers can work.  

search for the issues that you are watching using the JQL

watcher = currentUser()

this will return all the issues that you are watching right now. from the list, you can delete yourself from all the issues that you don't want to watch. 

Hope this works for you

-krishna

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 3, 2016

You need to go over the notification schemes with your administrators to make them more fit for your needs.

Remember that JIRA is about sharing, not getting totally different sets of information because you don't feel like seeing what your co-workers do - the schemes mean people get consistent behaviour and know that others are getting the same shared information.  But they are a bit noisy by default.

Aaron Bramson May 3, 2016

Problem 1) Supposedly I am the administrator, but I don't have access to the notification schemes.  I'll look into that with the person who actually did the purchasing and setup.

Problem 2) Facebook is about sharing too, but not everybody needs/wants to see everything that everybody else does.  People have their own preferences and there are many different use cases.  And for our use case we prefer being able to assign, watch, and complete tasks while in the JIRA dashboard without ALSO getting worthless emails about all the activity we just did/saw on JIRA.

Problem 3) Unless there is an option in the notification schemes to allow individual users to set their own notification preferences, JIRA fails to delver the product we want.  Some people work at home and/or part time and will want the emails so they know when there is something for them to do, others are working with the dashboard in front of them and the emails are annoyingly redundant. Consistent behavior in the way you describe only makes sense if every user in every use case is the same in their needs/preferences, and that is often not the case...at least it's not true in our case.  Assuming I eventually figure out how to access the notification themes, does such a capability exist?

Like # people like this
Aaron Bramson May 3, 2016

Problem 1 Solved: The person couldn't easily figure out how to transfer all the privileges, but now that there is this reason to, finally figured it out.

Problem 2 Frustrated: After eventually finding the notification options, I see there isn't one to let the users decide, which is a disappointment and a pity.  Also, there doesn't seem to be any way as the admin to set up what I want either.  For example, I can set either the assignee as an email recipient OR a single user (who it seems would get an email for every new task regardless of the assignee, but I'm not sure)...

...but what I want is for a particular list of assignees to get emails (while the rest do not).  There doesn't seem to be any functionality to set up that kind of contingency, but maybe there is a way to achieve this with the available options that isn't clear to me.  So, any advice on how to do that would be most welcome.

Like Flash_Sheridan likes this
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
May 3, 2016

JIRA does support "send email to one set of people and not another" in the notification schemes - the best option is to set it up for any particular event to be sent to the right people.  I usually recommend going over each event and thinking about who needs to get it individually - the default of reporter, assignee and watchers is often too noisy (for example, the reporter and assignee usually have no interest in people logging work, so I drop those two from the work log events), and there are cases where everyone is interested, and I would add roles to the schemes (I use roles so that the project administrator can add and remove individuals or groups).  For example, when a new issue arrives in a dev project, you want to tell the developers - use "issue created: role (developers)".

But the point of the notifications is to tell people that stuff is happening.  Consistently.  The users can not turn off notifications just because they feel like it.  They should work with the admins to come up with a scheme that works for everyone (even if it's "send no email", or "only email people in role X"), but they can't do it for themselves because then you have no idea whether someone who might need an email is actually getting it.  It's a poor attempt at collaboration if your whole team expects an email to drive something and you have one person who turns it off and can then be ignorant of what the others got.

But if the ability to randomly lose your expected email is a deal-breaker, then yes, you need to go elsewhere.

Aaron Bramson May 5, 2016

Your use case seems very different from mine, and your concerns seem different as a result. What I expected to find in the notification schemes is that the admin could assign certain notifications as "user's choice" and then the user could choose what notifications to get and turn them off and on depending on their immediate situation/workflow.  The admin could also set the notification scheme for certain tasks/events/etc to push to everybody and not let the users choose.  That would prevent the case you are worried about and also not require the admin and task creator to know the preferences of every user and whatever complicated notification scheme involving roles and labels that is required to get the notifications correct.  It seems a simple and obvious thing that at least some people want and I am surprised that the option doesn't exist in a product as mature and popular as Jira.

Andrew Lundell August 22, 2017

"They should work with the admins to come up with a scheme that works for everyone "

 

There is no such scheme.

So the de facto solution is for users to individually re-assert control by seting up email filters that auto-trash everything with JIRA in the subject.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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August 22, 2017

Well, I'm afraid that's completely wrong, because I've loads of people with schemes that work fine.  Because the admins have listened to the users.

Auto trashing is completely understandable.  But also totally the wrong approach.

Andrew Lundell August 23, 2017

Perhaps a story would help.

 

At my last employer we DID talk to the admin. Some coders felt their jobs depended on getting up to date notifications. Others, on the same team, had no use for them as they only focused on their assigned task.  Still others had no use for them then, but would have liked them after product-launch.

"No Problem", said the admin, "I'll just make it so you can adjust your own email settings."

A few minutes later he emerged from his office and said "Guys, you're not going to believe it, but JIRA doesn't even have that functionality!"

Two years later, I still don't believe it. 

Now I'm sure someone will point out how we could have reoganized our team or fiddled with some other settings or something, but the point is that it would be a total non-issue if JIRA had a piece of basic functionality that, nowadays, is considered standard and is expected for basically any online software.

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Michelle Hull February 14, 2018

There is an easier way to give everyone control.  Tweak your notification scheme so that the notifications are set to All Watchers.   Then, if you want notifications, on a specific issue, watch it, otherwise, don't watch it.    Those that want email can choose to watch.    

 

As for us, we have taken the time to create roles/groups, and use those for notifications.  Yes, some people get notifications they don't want, but we worked with each group of users by role, and determined what they felt would be worth notification, and what wouldn't.   We have an organization of about 500 users, and this works for us generally.  

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