What happens to mail notifications if user is being revoked JIRA-user permission and still is watcher of issue?

[Christian Czaia _Decadis AG_]

Hi,

I got a question regarding mail notifications. In my project there are many users which have been added as watchers. As soon as they leave the project (team) they are moved out of the group which has the JIRA-users permission, hence they can't login and use JIRA. However, they still are in the internal directory and assigned as watchers... do they still get email notifications if the mail address is still valid? (I'm using JIRA 5.0.7 so I can't disable the user)

Thanks for any comments

Christian

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It's not quite as simple as it looks on the surface, as there's a couple of things to look at.

First, you've got a user, with a valid email address. That means Jira knows where to send the emails.

Second, you've probably done the right thing in removing them from Jira users to prevent them logging in.

Third, the actual rule about sending email to people is "can they see the issue?". In your scenario, you've removed their direct access, but, if you can see that issue without logging in (anonymous browse access), then Jira will continue to send emails to them as a watcher, because they can still see the issue. Even if they can't log in and do anything with it, they can still see it, so they still get email.

(oops, I forgot this) You won't be getting errors in logs - there's nothing wrong with your setup or what you're doing to provoke an error!

[Christian Czaia _Decadis AG_]

Hey Nic,

anonymous login is turned off but after deleting the user (a test user) from the project role he couldn't "see" the issue so that was it I guess. Thanks!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Excellent.

Thinking about it, it doesn't need to be anonymous-access really - that's just where where I first ran into the problem!

The email system doesn't really know if someone can log in, it's got "this user has a valid email address, they are a watcher, and they can see this issue". It doesn't need them to log in, so it doesn't care if they can or not, it just sends the email because they can see the issue.

Hence, removing them from the role that lets them see the issue solves it.

[Christian Czaia _Decadis AG_]

Trying to reproduce this I

1) revoked the permission to login (no effect)--> mails were being sent out

2) threw the user out of the project role--> that way the user couldn't see the project and no mail are being sent out...

Hope that this was the solution...Can anyone officially confirm that?

Cheers Christian and thanks Mizan for your efforts

[Mizan]

I recreated the scenario in my test instance , the watcher once removed from the group which will recieve the notification will not get any email updates .

[Christian Czaia _Decadis AG_]

I kind of could reproduce it aswell. But I can't see any error whatsoever in my logs...

[Mizan]

I guess when users are removed from jira-users they dont get email notifications since they lose all permissions . There wont be any errors because of this.