How to configure email notifications

[Liz Blaney]

Afternoon

I'm a relatively new JIRA user. Apologies if this question has been asked before - I have searched through the forum but haven't found one that matches so far.

The way the JIRA email notification options have been explained to me are:

1. Notify everyone defined to the Project of any change to any Issues for that project, or switch off all notifications (i.e. users either get all notifications or none)

2. Individual JIRA users can change their "My Changes" profile setting to "Do Not Notify Me" if they don't want email notifications of any changes that they have made. However, those changes are still notified to all other users if the Project notification is switched On.

Many of my colleagues don't want to get email notifications of issues that other people create or update, but there doesn't seem to be a solution as far as we have been told.

This must be something that other organisations have come up against.

What we would like is for users to only get email notifications for any issues that they have either:

- created,

- updated (e.g. commented on etc.), or

- watched

Is this possible? Or do we need to get a third party add-on to be able to do this ?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

This doesn't sound quite right to me.

Your notification schemes can easily be configured to say things like:

• On create issue, tell the project lead and all the developers
• On edit issue, tell the reporter and the assignee
• On close issue, tell the developers and the reporter

And so on and on and on. There's a lot of flexibility in this, and it's not all-or-nothing by a long way.

However, it is essential that you talk to your users about this. At a glance at your last paragraph, I would set up your notification scheme to say "email reporter, watcher and participants" on the important events, and consider only mailing select sub-sets for the less important events (e.g. only watchers get emails about work being logged). But I'd confirm this with your users. (Note, I said "participants" - that's from a plugin and it simply shows the current assignee and all the people who have commented)

What you can't do is have a group of people get different notifications. If Alice, Bob and Chuck are "developers", and your notfication scheme says "on create, email developers", then they all get emailed. Bob can't opt-out, he needs to be moved out of the developers group. That's why you need to talk to your users - they need to give you rules that won't spam them, and yet won't drop emails they really need.

(The user setting of "don't mail me on my changes" can be seen outside this completely - most people really don't need an email to confirm that they've just done something, and it's a very useful flag)

[Liz Blaney]

Many thanks for the very prompt replies - I was hoping that it would be more flexible that we've been led to believe.

I'll pass the info on to the people who look after JIRA.

It's complicated - I don't get to see the JIRA notification scheme set up or any of the admin stuff.....

It sounds like we need to talk to each group of users, confirm their exact requirements (and get them to agree that they will all get the same notifications)

Then get the JIRA administrator to set up a notification scheme that suits what we want for each group.

Thanks again,

liz

[Randall Robertson]

You can define exactly those notification needs using the notification scheme settings in your project. How to set up a notification scheme is in the JIRA documentation (not to be confused with this answers forum). Most of what you are looking for comes with the standard notification scheme already. Reporters (creators) automatically get notified of changes to their issues. Commenting on an issue makes you a watcher automatically, although I believe that is an option you can turn on or off, and watches already get notifications of changes, too. So, you may just need to limit the roles and groups listed under each event in your notification scheme to prevent others from getting to many notifications.