Often, when people do not receive notifications from JIRA, it can be difficult and frustrating to find the cause. The two most common causes for notification-related problems are either outgoing mail server connectivity or misconfiguration of the notification scheme.
Troubleshooting outgoing mail server problems is quite simple. All you have to do is try to send out a test e-mails as described in the earlier section. If you receive your test e-mail, then there should be no problems with your outgoing mail server configuration, and you can focus on your notification configurations.
Troubleshooting notifications is not as straightforward, since there are a number of things that you will need to consider. To help with this challenge, JIRA 5 has introduced a new feature called the Notification Helper. The notification helper can save the JIRA administrators' time by helping them to pinpoint why a given user does or does not receive notifications. All the administrator has to do is to tell the helper who the user is, which issue (or an example issue from a project) the user should or should not be receiving notifications for, and the event that is triggering the notification:
- Log in to JIRA as a JIRA administrator.
- Click on Administration in the top menu bar.
- Select Notification Helper under Admin Helper section.
- Specify the user that is or is not receiving notifications in the User field.
- Specify the issue to test with.
- Select the type of notification event.
- Click on Submit.
Notification Helper will then process the input and report back if the user should be receiving notifications and why, based on notification scheme settings:
As you can see from the preceding screenshot, the user Patrick Li is currently not receiving notifications for DEMO-1 issue, because the notification is set up to have only the Current Assignee receive e-mails, and Patrick Li is not the assignee.