Issue Type icons broken in Jira e-mail notifications
Platform Notice: Data Center - This article applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this knowledge base article was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center knowledge base articles for non-Data Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. 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
Problem
Any notification sent by JIRA for an issue with custom issue type will have the icon broken if that was defined to use a system avatar instead of a custom one.
The following error appears in the atlassian-jira.log everytime an e-mail notification is triggered
2015-07-30 17:12:42,234 atlassian-scheduler-quartz1.clustered_Worker-4 ERROR admin Support - Mails [atlassian.jira.avatar.AvatarManagerImpl] System Avatar not found at the following resource path: /avatars/medium_genericissue.png
2015-07-30 17:12:46,321 atlassian-scheduler-quartz1.clustered_Worker-4 WARN admin Support - Mails [jira.mail.util.MailAttachmentsManagerImpl] Cannot add avatar as Mail attachment for 'issue type: Issue'
java.io.IOException: File not found
at com.atlassian.jira.avatar.AvatarManagerImpl.processAvatarData(AvatarManagerImpl.java:379)
at com.atlassian.jira.avatar.AvatarManagerImpl.readAvatarData(AvatarManagerImpl.java:492)
...
Cause
There are some avatars missing in medium size, that is the one used by Jira's email template manager, as described in the below bug report.
JRASERVER-43997 - IssueMail can't include system avatar images, they are not present (fixed in Jira 7.0 and later)
Workaround #1
Upload your own avatar and assign it to custom issue type. You can also re-upload same avatar from standard issue type if you want to have the same icon.
Workaround #2
According to this comment, the problem can be resolved by copying xsmall files to medium ones.
If you are on Linux, you can simply run the script we've put together (attached below) on the <JIRA_INSTALL>/atlassian-jira/classes/avatars directory (make sure you have read/write permission on the folder). This will copy all avatar with xsmall file to medium files.
Resolution
As described on the bug reported outlined above, the bug is already fixed in JIRA 7.0.2-OD release but is not fixed for JIRA Server yet.