Reduce email notifications

Question

For those of us with the Cloud product, is there any current means to reduce the email notifications caused by updating issues? Our notification schemes are as lean as possible. We use an external, home rolled, helpdesk system for all production support. Three yrs ago, I wrote a solution to take service requests from this helpdesk system and import them into JIRA appropriately, setting all kinds of parameters along the way, using the Atlassian api's. it has an end user interface to support importing a service request, one at a time, into jira, answering questions over a quick three-step wizard.

Anyway, my concern stems from the fact that a single notification email message is sent for each discrete insert/update made to a JIRA issue. Where a service request may have five attachments, it spams that many emails to the dev. The helpdesk ticket may have five journal entries on it; I write those as comments on the JIRA issue. In all, it's not uncommon for a dev assigned a single helpdesk ticket to get 20 notifications. Any suggestions, wise friends? We're still a couple years away from moving the entire 3500 person org to Atlassian for service desk, etc. Is there a way to pre-process these edits, or perhaps do so in bulk across the api to avoid notifications? Is there a property/key combo that could avoid notification triggers when issues inserted through the API?

* one notification for the assignment of the parent issue
* one notification for the assignment of the subtask issue
* one notification for each comment applied to the parent issue
* one notification for each attachment applied to the parent issue
* one notification for each custom field updated on the parent issue

Christopher Balogh_nqp19u · Answer

There may be a span of 3-4 changes in a 5 minute window that result in 5 emails. Individually, each change warrants an email, but if done sequentially they should all be contained in a single email.

How can this be accomplished? "trigger a subscription that only sends every 10(?) minutes to capture all changes in that period"

Paul Alexander · Answer

Phil, I did not know a notification scheme could get a subscription attached to it - that certainly should help me......or do you mean that an end user can establish a notification subscription to reduce the emails he/she gets?

Phill Fox_0rx7av · Answer

Have you tried to change the notification template to understand which event is triggering the updates? You should look at the create/ update and generic events as a starting point. If you can stop the automated emails then it is possible to trigger a subscription that only sends every 10(?) minutes to capture all changes in that period. Sometimes you might have an issue with lots of changes that happens to span the trigger point but most would be contained in a single email.