Watchers List doesn't update after removing user from Distribution List

[davin]

We manage Confluence Access through Distribution Lists and when an employee moves to another team, we simply remove them from our DL to prevent them from accessing our Confluence space moving forward.

But it has recently come to our notice that they still receive email notifications for the pages they were watching previously even when they cannot access Confluence. 

The obvious assumption here would be that the Watchers List should have been updated along with the DL when synced but it doesn't seem like the way its built out.

Is there a way to automatically remove users from the watchers list when they are removed from the DL itself?

[Kishan Sharma]

Hi Davin,

Just wanted to understand a bit about Distribution List. Have you created a dummy user in confluence and added the Distribution List email address to its profile ? and added that dummy user as watcher to your page/space ? If that is the case, removing member from your Distribution List should work and that member should not receive any email from confluence.

Another case - You might have created a group in confluence and added that user to the group which is also added as a watcher to page/space. In this case you need to remove the user from the group.

[davin]

Hi @Kishan Sharma 

We have Distribution Lists within our teams which are added as groups in Confluence.

But removing an user from that DL does not remove them from the Watchers List as apparently, the "Watchers List" is a separate entity that is managed in Confluence and not linked to the Permissions of a space. Hence we have been manually removing users who leave the team but this is almost impossible to get all the pages done.