One particular Jira user receiving too many notifications

[Hitesh Ashar]

Our system setup

I'm part of the team that maintains and manages our enterprise Jira suite. We have a relatively young setup with ~2k users and ~30k issues currently.

Issue

One particular Jira user in my system received way too many notifications, even on issues that the user is neither a participant nor a watcher.

This user is watching and has participated on 12 issues only but receives notifications on random issues from throughout the system without ever having even visited them. Relatively speaking, he is one our 'lighter' users in the system.

So far, this is the only user who's facing this issue, none of the other users are facing this.

Notification scheme

Our notification scheme is setup to mail 'All Watchers' and 'Current Assignee' on certain events. The scheme does not notify any users on 'Generic events'.

Bug Watcher plugin

We use the bug watcher plugin as it gives users finer control over notifications that they receive. I've check his profile with regards to each project and no where is he subscribed to all updates.

Type of notifications received

This user is receiving notification for pretty much every project (we have plenty), even the ones the user has never visited. Notification are for all types of issues in the system.

In addition, notification are received for all types of activities -- comment, assignment, workflow transitiions -- none of these seem to triggered by the notification scheme.

How do I diagnose why the users receives this volume of notifications and stop them?

Is there something we haven't check or verified yet?

Edit (11/3):

1. Clarified the title to state that its a user who's receiving too many email address
2. Added section 'Type of notifications received' to clarify on the nature of these notifications

[Corey_Tabb]

another useless forum tells you to download a plugin that costs money why do we pay Atlassian so much if they don't deliver much to us what are they doing with the money we give them because they are not investing it in customer features that the users want as i have seen so many requests over 10 years old and still not done or they just mark them as resolved when there not please sort this out you make millions each month I'm sure you can add the features we want considering how much money we make you

[Danilo Conrad]

Hi Hitesh,

I have two suggestions which might help you to identify what's causing this:

• Replicate the problem with Safe Mode enabled. This will help you isolate whether the problem is being caused by a plugin.
• Use the JIRA Notification Helper to confirm whether this user is included in any notification scheme which he should not be.

Alternatively, in case the suggestions above do not help, I would recommend you to raise a support ticket so we can investigate further.

Cheers,

Danilo

[Hitesh Ashar]

@Danilo Conrad [Atlassian] - see the following screenshots. This user should not be receiving mail per the notification helper. However, the second image is of him having received the email from Jira. 

Notification Helper output:

Capture1.PNG

Email is still received by the user:

Capture.PNG

To be honest, I'm quite puzzled by this behavior.

Edit: I'm unable to try the safe mode as it requires me to take down the system which is currently not an option. 

[Hitesh Ashar]

@Danilo Conrad [Atlassian] wondering if you had a chance to see this and if you had any thoughts ...

[Hitesh Ashar]

Just verified this - none of the users have an email address matching our inbound address. Infact, we do not have our inbound address configured.

[Jaime S]

Hi, Hitesh.

Have you identified if the issues this user is notified for are somehow related (same project, same issue type, same operation, etc.?). It can be as simple as a notification configuration. It is possible to se a single user to be notified for a specific user, given an operation.

I'd advise you to take one email, identify and operation (comment, issue creation, re-assignment, etc.) and the project and check the notification scheme for this project, for this user and see if the user is not set to be individually notified for it.

I hope it was helpful.

Kind regards.

Jaime Kirch da Silveira.

[Hitesh Ashar]

Hi Jaime Silveira [Atlassian], The notifications are totally random in this case. They are from projects that user is not associated with or even viewed. This is user a relatively new user and has only 'touched' about 12 issues in the system. I cannot find a pattern in the change operation either. It is totally random. The first things we checked were the notification scheme and the association of this user with those issues -- we found nothing wrong there. Also, we have ~2000 users on the system all having the same schemes and this is the only problem we know off. Do you have anything else in mind that I can try out or check something in Jira settings / DB to probe this further? Thanks, Hitesh

[Jaime S]

One thing you may try is to change the user's email address and see if the emails go to the old or new address. This way, you'll know if there's a reference to the user or to the email address somewhere. No ideas besides that.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

1600 is crazy, indicates something is generating them and/or you have a mail loop that is triggering those notifications. Check all registered JIRA user accounts for email addresses matching your inbound addresses. there should be NO match.

[Hitesh Ashar]

Good suggestion @Andy Brook [The Plugin People]. I'll try that and revert back. Wanted to check something with you while I try this out -- could it be the case that notification scheme (or whatever else thats causing this) only affects one user? Its like this user got 1600 email notifications day before while he only watches 12 issues, all of which had not changed that day and none of the notifications were related to these issues.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

locate an issue notification, track to the issue. reproduce that notification, eg comment. check notifications. then: 1. disable project association with the notification scheme. 2. repeat 3. notifications normal or still broken? DEBUG outbound mail sending, replicate from above, see how many mail cycles occur for the given recipient. If you're seeing multiple, you need to backtrack to where that mail came from

[Hitesh Ashar]

@Andy Brook [The Plugin People] thanks for the pointer. However, its not the workflow or scripts. We haven't had any customization to send out notifications (just verified this).

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Check Workflow post function for Script Runner scripts?, other Mail Handlers (like JEMH) can also create issue level notifications