Can an escalation send to an email without a user associated it with it?

[Areeba Turabi]

Is there a way to add an email to an escalation without having a user associated with it?

I've seen similar questions for which the answer is "no" but they were from 2020/2021 and I wanted to make sure nothing has changed. We already have users configured with their own personal email, but would like to also send all alerts to a shared team email group. It seems very roundabout (and expensive) to add a new user for each email we want to add as a recipient.

Here are the similar previously asked questions:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Opsgenie-questions/Can-alerts-be-forwarded-to-an-email-address-if-needed/qaq-p/1657793#:~:text=So%20Opsgenie%20can%20only%20send,can%20receive%20email%20notifications%20to.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Opsgenie-questions/Sending-e-mail-when-alert-is-created-in-OpsGenie/qaq-p/1453379

[Riley Venable · Accepted solution]

Based on my understanding of the platform, it is not possible to add an email address to an escalation without associating it with a user account. Each email address must correspond to a user account in order to receive alerts. One workaround could be to create a single user account for the shared email group and add that account to the escalation. Then, you can set up email forwarding for that account to ensure that all members of the group receive the alerts. This would avoid the need to create separate accounts for each email address.

[Areeba Turabi]

Thanks Riley, that does appear to be the case (you do need to associate the group email with a user account in order to do this directly). We did find a workaround though, you can set up an Amazon SNS integration: https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/docs/integrate-opsgenie-with-outgoing-amazon-sns/. You can configure OpsGenie to send to the SNS topic when an alert is created, and then configure SNS with a subscription to send to the email.