The Jira Cloud Struggle Nobody Talks About: Too Many Notifications

[#1]

One of the most common things I hear from teammates isn’t “Jira is slow” or “Jira is confusing.”
It’s actually:

“My inbox is drowning in Jira emails. I don’t even read them anymore.”

And honestly, I get it. When you’re buried under dozens of emails for every tiny update, you stop paying attention. But that’s dangerous - because the important updates get lost in the noise.

Why this happens

• By default, Jira’s notification schemes are… generous. Let’s just say everyone gets pinged for everything.

• Teams add watchers or “@mention” half the org just to be safe.

• Most users don’t realize they can tweak their own personal settings.

Put that together, and suddenly everyone’s inbox is chaos.

How I usually fix it (using only Jira Cloud features)

1. Audit the notification scheme

Head over to Project settings → Notifications.
Nine times out of ten, you’ll see every role getting notified for transitions, comments, assignments… the works.

My personal rule: if nobody is going to act on it, nobody needs the email.

2. Keep notifications action-oriented

• Assignee → transitions, comments, mentions.

• Reporter → resolution, closure, comments.

• Watchers → only major updates.

That’s all. Everything else? People can just check the board.

3. Show the team their personal settings

Most users don’t know they can control their email from Profile → Personal settings.
I make it a 5-minute walk-through in team onboarding - the relief on their faces says it all.

4. Push urgent stuff to Slack/MS Teams

With Jira Cloud’s built-in integrations, I usually add an automation rule like:
“When Priority = Highest, send message to #urgent-issues channel.”
That way, nobody’s hunting through emails to see if something is on fire.

5. Turn off auto-watch

By default, Jira auto-watches issues you create or update. I always recommend turning this off, so people only watch what they actually care about.

The difference

After cleaning this up, our team went from hundreds of Jira emails a week down to only the ones that matter.
And suddenly - people actually read them.

My takeaway

Jira Cloud doesn’t really have a notification problem - it has a defaults problem.

Tweak the scheme, guide your team, and the whole experience feels lighter.

Curious to know: How does your team handle notifications? Do you still rely on email, or have you shifted mostly to Slack/Teams?

[Ari Raatikainen]

Thanks @Akhand Pratap Singh for sharing the "fix list", which I put safe for future use.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this @Akhand Pratap Singh - a great, to-the-point read!

I think we are in the eye of this 'notification cyclone'! We are looking to communicate with our end users as they really do not know that they have a good level of control in terms of what notifications they can get.

I think a lot of users simply rely on the wider (and possibly more dangerous) 'unsubscribe' button.

Thank you again
Yatish

[Kelly Arrey]

Thanks @Akhand Pratap Singh this is a great article! Can you do one for Confluence too? Too many new Confluence users run screaming from the room when their inboxes get buried in notifications.

[Akhand Pratap Singh]

Hello @Kelly ArreySure, I will be writing something for confluence too.

@Yatish Madhav , rightly said about the unsubscribe button.

Thanks @Yatish Madhav , @Kelly Arrey and @Ari Raatikainen  for your kind words.

[Rune Rasmussen]

We are very much suffering from this.
And also a expanded version.

We have licensed users (JSM and/or JSW) who also submit requests in JSM projects.
This means they are now agents and customers.
Sometimes they will comment in their ticket as agents (and thus become watchers), rather than from the portal or by responded to the email they got.

This results in them getting duplicate notifications for many of the same things.