Troubleshoot notifications in Jira

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Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

The Jira application has a very flexible built-in facility for sending out email notifications under a wide variety of conditions. This guide is meant to help troubleshoot when email notifications are not being received.

Symptoms

No email notifications are being received by anyone (or are received with a very long delay or hours/days)


For more detailed troubleshooting about slow/stuck notifications, you can refer to the KB article Troubleshooting slow/stuck notification issues in Jira/Service Management Server/Data Center which lists all the known root causes for the situation where no notification emails are received by anyone from the Jira application.


Email notifications are not being received by a specific group of people/person, and/or from specific Jira issues

  • Check if the My Changes option in the user's profile is Notify Me. The default value for this property for all users can also be set under Administration > User Defaults
  • Check the project permissions under the project's permission scheme. Users must have Browse Project permission for the project to which the issue belongs. If you're using Issue Security Levels, ensure they are members of any Issue security levels that have been applied to the issue.
  • In case the notification was not received by these users from a specific workflow transition, it is important to note that notifications are triggered in a transition by their post-function. In such case, you will need to review the workflow configuration and check which events are fired for each transition and make sure that these events are configured with the right recipients in the notification scheme configuration.


For more detailed troubleshooting about this scenario, you can refer to the KB article Troubleshooting why a Jira user did not receive a notification from a ticket while this user was expecting to receive it which lists all the most common root causes.

A Jira user received a notification from a ticket while this user was not expecting to receive it

There can be some situations where a user received a notification email from the Jira application, while this user was not expected to receive it. To troubleshoot this issue, a few points to check include:

  • Checking if the Insight application is installed in ⚙ > Manage Apps > Manage Apps
  • Checking if the user is a component lead within the project
  • Checking if users are configured in ⚙ > User Management > Users (it could be that a user is configured with an email address that belongs to another user, and that notification emails were sent to that other user)


For more detailed troubleshooting about this scenario, you can refer to the KB article A Jira user received a notification from a ticket while this user was not expecting to receive it which lists all the most common root causes.

The content of the email notification is wrong

  • If the content of the notification refers to an invalid or non-existent issue, then the notification may be coming from another source (i.e. another Jira instance, separate from the problematic one). This situation can happen when you restore an XML backup of your production JIRA application instance into a development/test server or if there is another Jira instance connected to the same mailbox as the problematic one. The development/test/another JIRA server application then begins sending out notifications in addition to your production instance. Please see this guide on Disabling email sending/receiving for a Development/Test JIRA instance.
    To verify if the notification is coming from another Jira instance:
    - Check the source of the incorrect notification email for 'X-JIRA-FingerPrint' header, then locate the 'correct' notification, find the same header and compare the two - they have to be identical;
    - If X-JIRA-FingerPrint is missing (and that could be possible as some email servers strip what they consider unnecessary headers), look for 'client-ip=' header and compare the same to a good notification. If the IP addresses are different - it is likely that the notification is coming from a another Jira instance. To identify public IP address of the Jira server or cluster, you'd either need to reach out to your network administrator or use 3rd party free services like what is my IP address which can be also used from command line via curl command (e.g. 'curl ifconfig.me')
  • If users are receiving messages in HTML or Text and they wish to change this preference, have them change this property in their user profile under Outgoing email format.
  • If the URL links inside the content of the notification point to the wrong site, check your base URL property under Administration > General Configuration.
  • If the FROM: header of the mail being received is not what you've configured under Administration > General Configuration > Email from, check to see if the Project's Mail Project setting is set. It will override the global setting.

Duplicate notification emails are being sent from Jira applications

  • Check the atlassian-jira-outgoing-mail.log file to see if any SMTP timeouts are occurring, as in our Outbound mail fails to send in Jira server due to read timed out error KB article. JIRA applications may be successfully communicating with the mail server and sending the email and then timeouts while waiting for the response. As it does not receive a successful response from the SMTP, it will attempt to resend emails until it receives them.
  • If you have any third-party mail plugins, please disable them and retest the behavior to see if the problem can be isolated further.
  • Check if in addition to the seeded post-function from the "Create" transition, there is a third-party plugin which triggers the "Issue created" event. If that's the case, remove the "Issue Created" event trigger from the third-party app.
  • Check the notification scheme to see if it contains a mailing list - if it uses a mailing list and another notification item such as Assignee, and the assignee is also within the mailing list, JIRA applications are not able to identify the users of the mailing list and will end up sending duplicate notifications.

Notifications for filter subscriptions are not sent

If you're using a custom priority icon and the priority column in visible in your filter, the same issue above may be occurring with filter subscription.

If your filter contains at least one issue with a malformed priority icon, no notifications will be sent for this filter. 

General Troubleshooting Tips

  • The Notification Helper tool can be helpful to understand why a Jira notification was not sent to a specific user, from a specific Jira issue, and for a specific event:

    • This tool is located in the page ⚙ > System > Notification Helper
    • This tool will help confirm whether a given Jira user is eligible to receive a notification based on a specific event

    • (warning) Note that this tool only check if the user is eligible to receive the notification, but does not guarantee that the user will actually receive it (since other parameters will come into play)
    • When using this tool, make sure to test the impacted user along with the impacted Jira ticket and the event for which this user did not receive a notification
  • Reviewing your Jira application logs will greatly help you narrow down the problem. Often, the problem exists in the mail server and a Google search of the error from the logs can help you identify the cause.
  • The Mail Queue (under ⚙ > System > Mail Queue) can give you a general idea of how many emails are being generated.
  • You can get more debugging information in the Jira log files by going to the page ⚙ > System> Logging and Profiling and enabling the debugging packages listed below:
    • Click on Enable the Outgoing mail log
      • Then underneath that, Click Enable Debugging
    • Click on Configure logging level for another package
      • Use com.atlassian.jira.service as the package name, and select "DEBUG" for the "Logging Level"
      • Repeat the same step with com.atlassian.jira.plugins.inform.batching.cron.BatchNotificationJob
    • (warning) Remember to disable these once the problem is resolved as they can increase the overhead on server hosting, potentially cause degradation to performance and also consuming HDD space.
  • For even more detailed logging (display the message headers, protocol details), see Logging email protocols.
    • (warning) Note that logging email protocols is not recommended in most case, because it requires a Jira restart, and it adds logs at the Java Mail Library which is extremely verbose, will flood the log files and make them rotate very quickly


Last modified on Mar 14, 2024

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