How to filter notifications so I can easily see when another user @-mentions me

[Ryan Bickett]

Jira sends a very large number of notification emails. I am trying to find a way to surface the ones that are important to me and filter out the ones I don't care about. As a user who most frequently is creating and commenting on tickets rather than resolving them, the notifications that are most important to me are when another user @-mentions me in a ticket description or comment, since it usually means I'm being asked to provide/share information. 

I use Gmail, so perhaps a Gmail filter is a solution, but I haven't been able to construct one yet that drills down to those specific notification emails. I tried filtering on the phrase "mentioned you on" but the notification email doesn't always use that phrase when I'm mentioned for some reason.

[Mykenna Cepek · Accepted solution]

Firstly, if you haven't already, review your Personal Settings to ensure that they are set to match what you want to received:

Admittedly, these are very broad settings. That's why I go into two further areas below...

- - - - - - -

Next, review and ponder the controls that Jira offers at the Notification Scheme level. Your Jira admin(s) might value your input about which ones are useful, and which ones are noise. As a user, you might not be familiar with them, so here's a list:

• Issue Created
• Issue Updated
• Issue Assigned
• Issue Resolved
• Issue Closed
• Issue Commented
• Issue Comment Edited
• Issue Comment Deleted
• Issue Reopened
• Issue Deleted
• Issue Moved
• Work Logged On Issue
• Work Started On Issue
• Work Stopped On Issue
• Issue Worklog Updated
• Issue Worklog Deleted
• Generic Event

Each of these can be set for specific groups and users, and then applied to projects. So admins have a good amount of control over the raw amount and types of notifications that their instances produce. However, understand that admins will not want to manage these settings at a per-user level.

The intention of Notification Schemes is to apply a medium-broad notification approach for a wide range of Projects in your Jira instance. Lots more detail on this here.

If you can work with others in your team(s) to reach a consensus on what notifications to suppress, most Jira admins would be eager to get that input, and revise Notification Schemes as needed to provide greater value for the teams.

It's very common for teams to be frustrated by the default settings, and just ignore all Jira notifications. Obviously, that eliminates all the collaborative value that notifications provide, which is not ideal. Notification tuning takes time and attention -- both for the team, and for admins.

- - - - - - -

The LAST resort should be to create email filters to fine-tune your notifications -- specifically, ignoring the low/no-value ones. Be sure to share out your final rules with your team, again towards maximizing the value that Jira notifications offer.

[Ryan Bickett]

Thanks so much for the quick and detailed reply. One question I have, I'm not seeing the settings you shared in your screenshot. I'm adding my own screenshots below. Perhaps we're using an older version of JIRA? The About pop-up says v7.13.6.

I will reach out to our admins to see what controls over notifications they have.

[Mykenna Cepek]

Yeah, looks like you're probably on an older Jira Server version. My response assumed you were on Jira Cloud. I wasn't sure, since the question was tagged with an unknown Jira hosting type (Atlassian: make hosting type more obvious for users, please!!)

Your settings will likely show differently, and I believe you access them under "Settings" here:

The Notification Schemes are still a thing, but you might want to ask your Admin to verify the list I provided against what's available in your Server version.

I did notice that Server version 8.x (two years ago?) sounded like it included some additional notification controls. That rabbit hole starts here. So you could lobby for a Jira upgrade.

I also read about this add-on. However, I'm not sure how much value it adds beyond what Atlassian already put into Server v8.

Best wishes!