Restoring Data and Mail outgoing and incoming

[Stas Bojoukha]

Hi there, 

I am looking to import a configuration from another site in order to investigate some workflow issues they are having. My concern is that if I restore their backup their email puller and senders will kick in and cause some problems. 

I did a bit of testing and from what I can tell is if outgoing mail is disabled on import that will solve one of the problems, but I'm not sure about the email puller. 

Could anyone please confirm what happens with the mail settings on import of another completely different environment ?

Thanks,
Stas

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Stas,

Yes, I can confirm that when you do an XML import in Jira, by default all the settings are imported.  So yes, even the email puller is enabled by default and will likely cause problems if you have another Jira site with the same settings.  If the test site can connect to the email server first before the production, it's possible that the message can be processed on test instead of production, which would be a bad thing.

But there are ways to avoid this in a test system.  Please see our documentation on Restoring data from an xml backup.  The very first point in that guide are steps you can take to disable both the outbound and inbound email checks on the test system even before the XML backup is imported (or even before Jira starts up to connect to this other test database).

1. Disable email sending/receiving

If you are restoring production data into a test Jira instance for experimentation purposes, you have to disable all Jira application's email features before you begin:

• Disable email notifications — if Jira is configured to send emails about changes to issues, and you want to make test modifications to the copy, you should start Jira with the -Datlassian.mail.senddisabled=true flag.
• Disable POP/IMAP email polling — if Jira is configured to poll a mailbox (to create issues from mails), you will have to disable polling on your test installation by setting the -Datlassian.mail.fetchdisabled=true flag.

Exactly how to set these flags is dependent on your particular application server, .....

There are potentially different locations to set these parameters depending on how you start Jira (.sh script, .bat script, or via a Windows Service).   There are details on how to set these in Setting properties and options on startup.

With those parameters set when Jira starts up, you can be sure that this Jira instance will not be sending or receiving any mail.

I hope this helps.

Andy

[Andy Heinzer]

Stas,

It has occurred to me that you might be referring to using both a cloud backup and cloud restore option here.  In which case, you won't have control over the Jira JVM arguments at startup of a Jira Cloud site.   One option here would be to take a Cloud backup and restore it to a Jira Server instance as a means to test out this difference in which case my steps above would be helpful.  However since the platforms are not exactly the same as this point it might not be useful in your case because some workflow aspects might be different here.

If you are looking to test this on another Cloud site, I would actually recommend reaching out to our Cloud support team for help here.  Perhaps with their help it might be possible to adjust the configuration of the Cloud Jira in a manner to prevent both sending/receiving email here.   You would need to provide the details of this request in a technical support request that you can make to https://support.atlassian.com/contact/ Please be sure to include one of the Cloud URLs at the time of this request is created to make sure this is routed to the appropriate support team.

Sorry for the oversight here.

Andy

[Stas Bojoukha]

Thank you Andy, I am in conversation with technical support but this issue has definitely not been the most straight forward even for them to answer. Thank you for you help though. 

Stas