JIRA Service Desk Approval Email Not Sending

[Cole]

I started using the newer feature allowing for approvals through the portal and it seems that it doesn't send an email to the approver if they are also a request participant. How can I fix this? What other limitations does this feature have?

[Matthew Dell · Accepted solution]

For any customer notification, start by making sure you have a customer request type set. This is required for approval notifications to unlicensed recipients. It is also needed if a licensed user who is an approver is to use the "view request" link in the approval notification. It needs to be set before transitioning to a status where an approval is required.

Double-check your workflow to ensure the approval is looking at the correct field in your form and that the field is populated with one or more active users. I've seen some Jiras with multiple "Approvers" custom fields; pick the right one!

Hope it helps.

[Bob Griffin]

Your solution fixed my problem. I had a service desk project where approvals were setup in the workflow, but the approvers never received email notifications. It turns out the Service Desk Request Type was not set. Once I updated the request type, notifications are sent.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Cole,

Sorry to hear you are having this problem.  However I couldn't find any specific documented support cases that indicate having the same users in the request participant field and approver field would cause this notification to fail.

But it got me thinking more about what else might prevent that user from getting a notification that they have been added as an approver.   After some digging, I came across the Service Desk documentation on user differences.   Basically there are two different notification schemes in Service Desk, one for customers (which the approvers fall into that group) and another for Agents and Administrators.

The Agent/Admins get notified when an issue they are assigned to, reported, or watching is updated.  The possible exception here is when their profile in Jira is setup to NOT send notifications of changes that they make themselves.  So that is one possible way you wouldn't get a notification.

But with customers in Service Desk, they actually have to opt-in to receive notifications.

Approvers receive service desk notifications when a request transitions to a stage where their approval is needed. They must opt in to notifications to see other activity on the request.

So the act of adding an approver, isn't necessarily enough to send out a notification to that approver just yet.  But when the issue transitions to a stage that requires approval, then Service Desk should send out a notification to all the users in the approver field of that issue at that time.

There are scenarios where that user is not opted in to receive notifications on that issue yet, and in turn they don't know about this issue.  Additionally, there is another scenario where the user being added as an approver is actually a Service Desk Agent/Admin.  In which case they are actually expected to be treated as a customer role in that case. There was a bug created for this scenario in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-4167

Ultimately, it was determined that this specific functionality is expected in the cases demonstrated there.  But in turn there is an existing feature request created to improve this experience in Service Desk, I would recommend https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-4207 for more details.   I'm not sure if your situation follows those other cases yet or not.

To better understand your situation, could you let me know

• the roles this approver exists in this service desk project (Agent, customer, both?)
• The user account that added this user as an approver, which roles does this user have? Is the user making the change to approver the same user as the approver?
• Is the issue actually in a state that requires approval?

[Vassili Gorbenko]

Hi Andrew.

I have similar issue when approver don't get the notification, but in my case there is no notification for any kind of user who set as an approver (customer, agent, jira user). It seems that some settings are broken or something, but I don't know what. In the workflow and notification scheme all setting are default.

Regards,

Vassili

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Vassili,

Is this a Jira Cloud instance?  If so, it might be best to create a support request for this problem over in https://getsupport.atlassian.com

If this is a Jira Server instance, you can still create a support request there, provided that you are a named contact on a non-starter license, but our support team will likely need to gather more information from your system such as a support zip.