Hide comments from email notifications

[Stefany Mallo]

Does anyone know how to hide the content of the comment from the email notifications sent by Jira?

My team sometimes puts sensitive information in those comments and we don't want it in an email.

[Daniel Wong]

Hi Stefany,

There's no way to hide specific content in an email notification. However, what you could get your team to do is to add a 'Restricted Comment' which will only be visible to certain users of a project role / group. This should ensure that any notifications are only sent to whoever can view the restricted comment.

You can refer to this KB for how to add a restricted comment - https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/add-restricted-comments-on-jira-962353957.html

[Stefany Mallo]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for that, unfortunately it doesn't help in my case.

My entire team is allowed to view the comment contents however we don't want the comment contents emailed because emails are not 100% secure.

[Daniel Wong]

I see. You could still use the 'Restricted Comment' method to limit notifications first by restricting the comment to only yourself (via project role/group that only you are in), then removing the restriction so the comment is visible to the whole team.

Couple of other ways that might work:

• Add a custom workflow transition called 'Add Sensitive Comment'. Map this to a custom event with no notifications. You will have to enforce your team to use this transition each time when adding sensitive comments so that no notifications go out.
  • You can read up more on custom events in workflows here - https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/adding-a-custom-event-938847495.html
• Add comments via Bulk Edit. When you add a comment via Bulk Edit, there is an option to not send out notifications. Unfortunately you will have to bulk edit each time you want to add a comment to just 1 issue.
• A more technical alternative is to modify the issuecommented.vm velocity template in Jira.
  • You can read up more on customising email content here - https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/customizing-email-content-938847640.html
  • Please note that with your use case, this is probably not an easy task as you will need to figure out a way to programmatically understand which part of a comment is 'sensitive' and should not be included in the notification email.