Issue Type icons broken in Jira e-mail notifications

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

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Problem

Any notification sent by JIRA for an issue with custom issue type will have the icon broken if that was defined to use a system avatar instead of a custom one.

(Auto-migrated image: description temporarily unavailable)

The following error appears in the atlassian-jira.log everytime an e-mail notification is triggered

1 2 3 4 5 6 2015-07-30 17:12:42,234 atlassian-scheduler-quartz1.clustered_Worker-4 ERROR admin Support - Mails [atlassian.jira.avatar.AvatarManagerImpl] System Avatar not found at the following resource path: /avatars/medium_genericissue.png 2015-07-30 17:12:46,321 atlassian-scheduler-quartz1.clustered_Worker-4 WARN admin Support - Mails [jira.mail.util.MailAttachmentsManagerImpl] Cannot add avatar as Mail attachment for 'issue type: Issue' java.io.IOException: File not found at com.atlassian.jira.avatar.AvatarManagerImpl.processAvatarData(AvatarManagerImpl.java:379) at com.atlassian.jira.avatar.AvatarManagerImpl.readAvatarData(AvatarManagerImpl.java:492) ...

Cause

There are some avatars missing in medium size, that is the one used by Jira's email template manager, as described in the below bug report.

JRASERVER-43997 - IssueMail can't include system avatar images, they are not present (fixed in Jira 7.0 and later)

Workaround #1

Upload your own avatar and assign it to custom issue type. You can also re-upload same avatar from standard issue type if you want to have the same icon.

Workaround #2

According to this comment, the problem can be resolved by copying xsmall files to medium ones.

If you are on Linux, you can simply run the script we've put together (see below) on the <JIRA_INSTALL>/atlassian-jira/classes/avatars directory (make sure you have read/write permission on the folder). This will copy all avatar with xsmall file to medium files.

rename.sh

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 count=0 for file in $( ls -l | grep 'xsmall_' | awk '{print $9}' ); do let count=$count+1 newfile=$( echo $file | sed 's/xsmall/medium/g' ) cp $file $newfile done echo 'Copied '$count' files'

Resolution

As described on the bug reported outlined above, the bug is already fixed in JIRA 7.0.2-OD release but is not fixed for JIRA Server yet.

Updated on April 15, 2025

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