Jira notification emails are not delivered to the recipients because of the error 501 5.1.8 UTF-8 addresses not supported
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
Summary
Some notification emails cannot be delivered and remain in the error queue.
The following error appears in atlassian-jira-outgoing-mail.log:
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2023-01-01 11:16:20,438+0300 ERROR [] Sending mailitem PostprocessingMailQueueItem{delegate=To='address_with_special_characters@mail.com' Subject='Updates for ITSM-1: A new comment was added' From='null' FromName='Test User (Jira)' Cc='null' Bcc='null' ReplyTo='null' InReplyTo='<JIRA.168021.1671543117000@Atlassian.JIRA>' MimeType='text/html' Encoding='UTF-8' Multipart='javax.mail.internet.MimeMultipart@734c42a' MessageId='null' ExcludeSubjectPrefix=false'} anonymous Mail Queue Service [c.a.mail.queue.MailQueueImpl] Error occurred in sending e-mail: PostprocessingMailQueueItem{delegate=To='address_with_special_characters@mail.com' Subject='Updates for ITSM-1: A new comment was added' From='null' FromName='Test User (Jira)' Cc='null' Bcc='null' ReplyTo='null' InReplyTo='<JIRA.168021.1671543117000@Atlassian.JIRA>' MimeType='text/html' Encoding='UTF-8' Multipart='javax.mail.internet.MimeMultipart@734c42a' MessageId='null' ExcludeSubjectPrefix=false'}
com.atlassian.mail.MailException: javax.mail.SendFailedException: Invalid Addresses;
nested exception is:
com.sun.mail.smtp.SMTPAddressFailedException:
...Environment
Any Jira version.
Cause
The issue lies outside Jira as the error seen in the logs is received by Jira from the SMTP server. The mail server rejects the message because the recipient's address contains special characters (e.g. ö, é, etc).
Most of the mail servers do not accept UTF-8 characters in the email address, but only ASCII ones. For more details about this topic, you can check the following external resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_email#Email_addresses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Internationalization
Solution
To work-around this issue, modify the user's email address and replace the special characters with regular ones.
Alternatively, you may contact the SMTP server's administrators to see if they can change the configuration and have the server accept international email addresses.
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