How to stop notifications to previous assignee

Ramesh Udari1 February 3, 2014

Hi, When ever issue is assigned to XYZ and assign it to myself, then Jira will generate an email to send to both of you that is old assignee and new assignee. Here we want to stop mails to old assignee. In our company couple of senior executives complaints that reassigned notifications for old assignee is useless. Can you please suggest us, how to stop notifications to old assignee in this case.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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February 3, 2014

Well, your execs are wrong - if someone reassigns an issue that belongs to me and I don't get an email, then how do I know I should stop working on it?

Anyway, you won't be able to stop this directly. If your notification scheme says "email assignee" for the "issue assigned" event, then it will send to both old and new assignee. You either need to do a bit of coding in the core to kill it off, or stop using the assign-to link, limiting yourselves to editing the assignee as part of a standard edit action

Ramesh Udari1 February 3, 2014

Thanks for response this Nic!!

Can you please expalain me bit more on customization to achieve this.

Vishal Gautam March 6, 2014

Sending the assigning event update to both previous and new assignee is understandable, but we are seeing a wired behaviour with our installation (JIRA 6.1.5) - even after we reassigned, further updates or comments are still being sent to previous assignee, as if the previous assignee is added to watcher's list, which it's not, at least not visible. Any idea what could be causing this and any ways to avoid 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.
March 6, 2014

You've half answered this yourself - the users have been added as watchers.

To prevent that, turn off "autowatch" and Jira will stop adding people who comment or change issues as watchers. It is a personal setting though - people can enable it or disable it in their profile. I'd consider changing the default to off if it's causing you issues.

@Tom- really sorry, didn't see the update. You'll need to dig into the core around the listener that is catching and sending emails. I've never done it myself, so I don't really know where to start, other than downloading the code and having a look for the email sub-system.

Vishal Gautam March 6, 2014

Thanks for quick response Nic! If the previous assignee was being added as watcher, it should be visible in the watcher's list right? We don't see that hence this question.

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 6, 2014

Ok. You need to work back from basics. What does the notification scheme say? The previous assignee must match that in some way.

Vishal Gautam March 6, 2014

Found the issue ... it was autowatch as you had suggested. When I turned the global level autowatch off, notification to previous assignee stopped. So prev assignee was being treated as watcher eventhough it didn't show up in watcher list, unlike when you comment on the issue, you get added as watcher by virtue of autowatch but you are shown in the watcher's list. Thanks for your help!

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