Resolve Email Bounce Issues in Jira Service Management Cloud
Platform Notice: Cloud Only - This article only applies to Atlassian apps on the cloud platform.
Summary
If customers are not receiving email notifications, the mail server might have permanently rejected an Atlassian email.
Solution
Common causes for recipient mail server rejection
There are various reasons for an email to be rejected by the recipient mail server, including:
The email address mailbox doesn’t exist on the recipient mail server.
The recipient mailbox is full.
A misconfiguration on the recipient mail server.
Temporary outage on recipient mail servers.
A bounce from a recipient email server instructs our email-sending infrastructure not to attempt the redelivery of this email. A bounce is classified as a permanent error. Atlassian must do as instructed to comply with the protocols that define how email systems work together on the Internet (RFCs).
Confirm the email is being suppressed and why
Check for bounces at the recipient server
If a user is missing email notifications, please check with your mail server administrators to see if Jira emails have bounced for that user. The recipient mail server administrators must also check the configuration of their mail servers to prevent future bounces from Atlassian emails.
Check for suppression on the Atlassian mail-sending lists
There are three tools you can use to check if an email address is on Atlassian's suppression list.
For new users who have not logged in: Resend invite link.
For existing users who have stopped receiving email notifications from Jira: Project email audit.
For existing users of JSM, admins can now unblock the email address directly.
From your service project, select Customer notification logs > Request notifications.
Select Unblock email address for any email address that is blocked.
If your customers have configured their mail server correctly and confirmed there is no blocking from their end, you can contact Atlassian Cloud Support to remove a user's email address from the suppression list. Please make sure to provide the affected email addresses in your ticket Description.
Suppression Lists
Email servers use a reputation system to differentiate legitimate emails from bulk unsolicited emails (also known as spam).
Email sending reputation is very important to guarantee delivery of our emails. Atlassian and our Email Service Providers (ESPs) do a lot of work to ensure the reputation of our sending IP addresses is healthy.
Our ESPs use suppression lists to minimize the amount of repeated failed deliveries to invalid email addresses and maintain our reputation. A recipient email is added to the suppression list after we receive a single bounce. Once an email address is on the suppression list, further emails to that email address will not be attempted.
This means that if a Jira email is rejected by your email server with a bounce, the recipient's email address will be placed on the suppression list, and we will prevent further emails from being sent to it.
Example scenarios
The email address does not exist yet on the recipient mail server. This can happen if the customer's Jira/Atlassian account is setup before their email account exists.
A newly hired person’s email is being setup and the Site admin sent a user invite from Jira. This is what happens:
Jira sends the email invite to the new customer's email address (charlie@<yourdomain>.com).
The customer (recipient)'s mail server is checking if charlie@<yourdomain>.com exists in their system.
Since the email is being setup, it's possible that the mail server could not find the account/email address.
The customer's mail server bounces/rejects the email by sending the message back to the Atlassian/Jira mail server.
Atlassian mail server adds charlie@<yourdomain>.com to the Suppression list. (Read more about the Suppression list below).
The recipient email server has rejected the email due to their configured security or anti-spam rules.
These security rules are configured by the recipient’s security or IT team. They can include allowing or blocking certain domains or other anti-spam mechanisms.
Related articles
These other articles might be helpful to troubleshoot email delivery problems:
Was this helpful?