How to Fix Customer Notification Issues in Jira Service Management Cloud

Platform Notice: Cloud Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.

Summary

This article details how to troubleshoot email notifications in Jira Service Management. It focuses primarily on why JSM customers are not receiving notifications.

Background

Notifications sent by Jira Service Management projects are known as "customer notifications", and they work differently than those sent by Jira. There are two main requirements for sending a customer notification:

  1. The ticket has a valid Request Type.

  2. The event to notify belongs to a Service Project ticket.

Tickets that don't meet both criteria are not Jira Service Management requests. They are regular Jira tickets and will not be sent to Jira Service Management customers.

Solution

Jira Service Management Notification Scheme

Tickets that are affected by the Service Management notification system will have altered notifications to users playing the following customer roles:

  • Reporter.

  • Request Participant.

  • Member of an Organization (situational).

  • Approver (situational).

Notifications to users in these roles will be sent according to the customer notifications page:

  • Go to the Project settings page > Notifications > Customer notifications.

For users who are not in these roles, notifications will be sent according to internal notifications:

  • Go to the Project settings page > Notifications > Internal notifications.

As mentioned in this document, when we add a user/customer(who is also added to one of the customer roles) as a watcher or assignee in the request, this user will receive internal notifications instead of customer notifications. For customers with Atlassian Accounts added as a watcher, the account will not receive customer notification.

Requirements for Customer notifications to be sent to customers

System

Tickets

Customer

  • Is the reporter or a participant or member of an organization the ticket is being shared with.

  • Has a valid email address.

Common issues and their resolution

If the answer to the question is Yes, continue, otherwise follow the instructions in the No column.

Question

No

Is this a valid Jira Service Management request?

* Check that the ticket is in a Service Management project. * Make sure the "Request Type" field is populated.

Can the customer see the ticket under "My Requests" in the customer portal?

* Check if the customer is the reporter, request participant, or member of an organization the ticket is being shared with. * Organization members only receive the first notification of the ticket being shared with that organization and they must access the ticket from the portal to opt-in for the following notifications of that ticket. More details can be found in Everything we should know about customer organizations in Jira Service Management projects.

* If an issue is moved from one project to another we will need to add the users or reporter from the old project to the new project as well. * We can either add the user from: ** Service Project > Customers page - Add a customer to a service project as a portal-only customer or ** Service Project > Project Settings > People page - Add users to your project as a user with any of the available roles in the project.

Are customer notifications enabled in Jira Service Management?

* Enable them in the project settings: ** Go to the Project settings page > Notifications > Customer notifications.

Is the user the reporter, request participant, or member of an organization the ticket is share with?

*Add the customer as a participant to the ticket or to the organization which the ticket is shared with.

Is the user subscribed to receive customer notifications?

*Ask them to open the request on the customer portal, and click on Notifications Off under the request's status to turn it On.

Were all translations reviewed in the Language support settings?

*Go to Project settings > Language support and check if there are yellow marks next to a language added to your project:

** In this case, you can either remove the unwanted languages or confirm each pending review by clicking on each language, selecting each component with the yellow mark, and clicking on Confirm translation.

Does the ticket have an issue security set?

(For

Company-managed

projects only)

* Open the request and check if it has an issue security level. ** In this case, it's necessary to make sure the customer role is added under security levels in the issue security scheme associated with your project(Project settings > Access > Issue security). Add "Service Desk Customer - Portal Access" role to the security level.

* The security level lock icon will only appear if there's a security scheme set for the project, and if the Security level field is added to the View/Edit screen. Only users with permission can set the issue security level.

Does the customer have a valid email address?

* Invite the correct email address under the Customers page and replace the customer account in the ticket:

** Open the service project > Click on Customers in the sidebar.

Does the customer have duplicate accounts using the same email address?

* Please see how to check if they have duplicate accounts and the solution in the following document:

* Permission and access issues due to duplicate accounts.

Have you performed any testing on the mail address?

* Try sending an email outside of Jira, using a separate mail account to check if the emails are routing.

Are you having issues sending out notifications only for the Resolved and Reopened actions?

* Please see Service Management Notifications not sent on Resolved or Reopened Requests.

Are you having issues sending out only customer satisfaction surveys?

* Please check the following document to find the most common reasons for this behavior:

** How to troubleshoot when a customer satisfaction survey is not being sent in the Jira Service Management Cloud.

Is the notification to customers going as plain text?

* You can manage the Email format to change the format by going to:

** As a Jira administrator, click on the Cog icon in the right corner > System > Default user preferences. ** Choose HTML or plain text for customer notifications.

Does the customer not a issue watcher at the point the notification should have been trigger?

* Remove the customer from the watcher list. * For future prevention, you can create an automation rule to automatically remove the customer from the watcher list, especially for reporters.

Updated on June 23, 2025

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.