Change to Skip Confirmation Notification option in Statuspage

[#1]

Hi Statuspage Community,

On February 1, 2024, Google launched a series of new email protection requirements. Because of those requirements, we were forced to make changes concerning the bulk upload of email IDs for subscribers in Statuspage - specifically, the ability to “Skip Notification Confirmation” for newly added recipients.

We acknowledge that some customers have already had workflows impacted by this change and apologize for the unexpected behavior as a result of delayed communications around this update.

Before this change: Users could bulk upload email IDs via the Manage portal or through API as a way to maintain subscribers who wanted to be notified of incident progress, updates, etc. Email IDs could be bulk uploaded without the need for email acceptance, meaning users could send report links to emails without the recipients having to opt in to receive those emails from the site or having an Atlassian Identity profile.

New Experience: Email IDs can still be bulk uploaded via either method, but email recipients now need to accept the invite even if “Skip Confirmation Notification” field is true. “Skip Confirmation Notification” is no longer an option and all recipients must opt-in to receive emails.

To learn more about importing email subscribers and notification settings, please review our support documentation or include questions below for our product and engineering teams to answer.

[Kevin Paulovkin]

For companies using Internal Statuspage Pages and SSO authentication, we need the ability to Bulk Subscribe our Internal users without having the confirmation process attached.

Please consider adding a feature request to allow us to override the confirmation notification and auto-subscribe users.

For our specific use case, we would only be bulk adding users in our company's custom email domain - So that could also be a parameter you could require to prevent this functionality being used by Spam bots.

[Luca Bavaro]

We have the same requirement as Kevin Paulovkin has expressed in his comment. In our case, we need the ability to Bulk Subscribe users to communicate Internal Incident announcements.

We're using it in the same way, "we would only be bulk adding users in our company's custom email domain - So that could also be a parameter you could require to prevent this functionality being used by Spam bots."

[Salvatore Insalaco]

The same for us. We have an onboarding workflow where we subscribe internal user's email automatically.

Requiring them to confirm subscriptions is a huge setback!

[Peter Farrell]

This was communicated far too late, as we ran into issues caused by this uncommunicated API change during a migration over a month ago that left several customers in a very valid state of confusion. 

This new change is not helpful, and the presumed DKIM Changes from Google: https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/ and https://support.google.com/a/answer/174124 aren't to blame for poor communication and process changes. 

This effectively leaves anyone trying to migrate from one Statuspage tenant to another in the very awkward position of starting completely over, since Atlassian's own docs effectively say as much: https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/transfer-products-to-another-organization/ 

[Eugene Pak]

Hi @Kevin Paulovkin @Luca Bavaro @Salvatore Insalaco @Peter Farrell , 

Again, would like to apologize on behalf of the team for the issues that the late communication for the rollout created. We can make an exception to have this change overrides - if you could submit a ticket with us via support.atlassian.com, our support team can take care of you. 

Please let me know if there are any other questions and thank you in advance.

[Luca Bavaro]

@Eugene Pak - Can you explain exactly what you mean when you say you can override the change?

I'm being told by Support that if we get an exception to override the change, we can stop the email from being sent, but we would still need the user to confirm (opt-in).

Are we able to get it to work like it did before the change? Which was, Confirm the user's subscription without their acknowledgement? 

[Balamurugan Pasumpon]

@Eugene Pak @Peter Farrell  - Is this applicable only for Bulk upload? This won't impact if the users are added individually, right?

[les]

Not only is confirmation needed now, but when a subscriber list was uploaded with specific components selected for each subscriber - every subscriber got all components.  Why would that happen?

Is there a way subs can log in and change the components themselves and I'm missing it?

This change and not communicating it in advance is a real disaster for using this tool. 

[Prithwish Basu]

@Balamurugan Pasumpon This is applicable for all email subscribers (Bulk/Individual) added from the Statuspage manage portal.

Note: If subscribers are subscribing to a Statuspage/components themselves as we have OTP validation for them in the flow itself, this change does not impact them.

@les This looks like an issue, please raise a support ticket in https://support.atlassian.com/contact if you haven't raised already, and the team will take a look. Please mention if you were trying it from the Manage portal, or the API. Thanks.

[Balamurugan Pasumpon]

Thanks @Prithwish Basu for the confirmation. One more query to this. I know DL is not recommended, but if we are adding DL and use it only for email communication, and ask the users not to set password for the portal, will this DL move to "Unsubscribed/Quarantined" state after some days/month due to this change? Will they continue to get the emails?

[Prithwish Basu]

Hi @Balamurugan Pasumpon Here's the reason we strongly recommend against using a distribution list for emails https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Statuspage-questions/Can-I-use-group-email-distribution-lists-for-subscription/qaq-p/1517898

From Statuspage side, we do not differentiate between emails sent to individual users, and emails sent to distribution list, and the validation requirement for Subscribe action is same for both.

[Mario Cappellano]

Was there any solution for this? We were thinking of rolling out Statuspage but even with only 500 or so subscribers, ensuring that they actively go and hit the confirm button will be a problem. Also, looking at your documentation and API four months after this announcement, there are still multiple mentions of the confirmation override everywhere, but only some mention that it doesn't work anymore? It isn't clear if this change still persists or if you've rolled it back?

[Peter Farrell]

Hey @Mario Cappellano - for what it's worth, we had a very difficult time with our Statuspage migration. If Atlassian still can't be bothered to update their docs to a disruptive change made over 4 months ago and the best they can offer is "Sorry, please put in a ticket" then I'd weigh that in your decision making. 

Best of luck.