This page last changed on Jun 14, 2009 by rosie@atlassian.com.
JIRA 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
- Ensure you've properly configured an SMTP Server. Send a Test Mail inside the SMTP Server configuration setup screen. Make a note of any error that is returned from the test.
- Check JIRA's log files and the application server log files for Out of Memory errors. Typically, the log file will show java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space. This has been known to cause the service responsible for sending emails out to fail until JIRA is restarted. You should further troubleshoot your memory issues using this guide.
- Check and ensure the Mail Queue Service is installed. Click Admininstration > Services to inspect that the service exists, and is set at a reasonable interval. This interval controls how frequently the mail queue is processed. You can flush the mail queue to send out pending messages immediately to your mail server.
- Inspect your Mail Queue under Administration > Mail Queue. See if you are given the option to Bypass currently sending mail. A stuck email or trackback ping can hold up the queue. See JRA-7903.
Email notifications are not being received by a specific group of people/person
- Check if the Email me when I make changes option in the user's profile is true. 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.
- Inspect the Mail Queue under Administration > Mail Queue and see if notifications are being queued. You can adjust the Mail Queue Service interval to a longer period for troubleshooting purposes. Inspect the Error Queue tab for any errors.
Notifications aren't occurring after clicking through a transition/workflow step
- Notifications are triggered in a transition by the its post-function.
- Inspect the post-function of the transition step you're investigating and ensure it's firing an event. This example shows the Work Started On Issue event.

- Inspect your notification scheme and check that the event Work Started On Issue actually has people mapped there.
- Ensure the notification scheme you just checked is actually assigned to your project.
Please see the documentation on JIRA Events, workflow Post-Functions, and Notification Schemes as they are all related.
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. This situation can happen when you restore a XML backup of your production JIRA instance into a development/test server. The development/test JIRA server then begins sending out notifications in addition with your production JIRA instance. Please see this guide on Disabling email sending/receiving for a Development/Test JIRA instance.
- 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 points 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.
Issues created from e-mail do not generate notifications
- Please check your mail handler configuration and ensure that notifyusers is set in the handler parameters.
General Troubleshooting Tips
- Reviewing JIRA's 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 Administration > Mail Queue) can give you a general idea of how many emails are being generated.
- You can get more detailed logging under Administration -> System -> Logging & Profiling. Click Edit next to the com.atlassian package and change it from the WARN logging level to DEBUG. This change does not persist after a restart.
- For even more detailed logging (display the message headers, protocol details), see Logging email protocols.
Related Links
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