Can we disable "public comment added" notification in JIRA Email this Issue?

[Jon Taylor]

We are using JIRA email this issue, and when a customer emails from the outside for the first time we let them know that we have received their request. Now when they reply to our first comment and all subsequent comments they are receiving a notification kicked off by the "Public comment Added" notification.

Is it possible to disable this customer email notification?

[Tibor Hegyi _META-INF_ · Accepted solution]

Hi all,

We had a screensharing session with Greg and identified the issue. What happened was that if a customer sent an email as a reply to a former notification, the comment was added to the issue as expected. However, the Public Comment Added notification was sent back to the email sender with the comment text.

So the customer just received a notification on his own email.

We will improve this and make sure that customers will not receive these emails back.

PS: Jeti notifications respect "My changes: do not notify me" profile settings, but you can configure it to ignore the preference.

Tibor

[Greg Johnson]

Thanks @Tibor Hegyi _META-INF_ - useful call.  Is there a timeline for when this will be fixed?

[Tibor Hegyi _META-INF_]

Well, it will take a while now, but we include the fix in the next version most probably end of September. 

[Greg Johnson]

@Jon Taylor said "Jira email this issue" but we guess the more common name is simply "JETI" - so yes, we have disabled all JSD Customer Notifications and are relying on JETI to handle all of them.

It appears that this behaviour is something no-one else has seen.  We will try creating a new Jira project, adding JETI, and seeing if it goes away.

Thanks to all for your help!

[Jack Brickey]

It would also be interesting to disable JETI and see if the notification occurs.  I would also suggest reaching out to the Author  of the addon for their thoughts 

[Bastian Stehmann]

We did not had exactly this problem when we used JETI, but problems with JETI Notifications were quite common, as they are very complex to configure and especially when using them in combination with Jira SW / SD notificiations, there were quite often dublicated notifications.

So, if you configure a new project, make sure there are no defaults or configurations without an project, so that you can exclude this from your possible problems list. 

Edit: Something that I just comes into my mind. If I remember correct, JETI notifications ignore (or at least can ignore) the "Don't notify me on my own changes" Setting in the User Profile. Can you check, if you configured that correct. 

[Bastian Stehmann]

Hi @Greg Johnson anders @Jon Taylor,

It is some time ago that I used JETI, but if I remember correct,  you can configure your own notifications in JETI, which are completely independent of all other configurations. Can you please check if you have configured something there.

[Jack Brickey]

@Jon Taylor, welcome to the Community. Yes you can certainly do this but I would caution against this as the purpose of the public comment is in fact to share w/ the customer. With that said...

project > Project Settings > Customer Notifications > Public comment added

edit that rule and at the bottom click to disable it.

[Jon Taylor]

Thanks for the prompt reply!

I have tried this, but as you said it no longer shares our public comment with the customer. 

What I am looking to do is to stop the email that the customer receives when they respond.

[Jack Brickey]

Jon, so that i'm clear here are you saying that the customer receives a notification for a comment added when they are the one that commented? This should not be the case. If so, can you please do the following and tell me what you see? Note i'm on cloud so there likely is a different behavior here.

1. go to the view issue screen of one of the issues you are seeing this behavior on
2. from the "Admin" button at the top (may not be there on server) select notification helper
3. enter the customer's name and choose commented

what are the results? Hopefully you have Notification Helper capabilities. 

[Jon Taylor]

That is correct. 

In this test, I am writing in from my personal email.

[Jon Taylor]

Here is an example of what the customer sees:

Customer Jon writes "adsfadsfs" to RBR Support (test)

Then 1-2 min later he receives the same message returned from RBR Support (test)

[Jack Brickey]

So the Notification helper says you should not receive a notification. which is as I would expect. I assume the second screenshot Is it from your gmail account? 

Another question it appears that you have created a gmail account in your name so you can test as a customer. Have you verified if actual customers are experiencing the issue of receiving notifications of their own comments. 

The bottom line is you should not be receiving notifications for your own comments. And I have just proven that it works as it should for me. What happens if you comment as an agent? Do your agents get notifications

I'm wondering if you have some automation setup for notifying customer on comments. Something is certainly incorrect here. 

Maybe you can provide a bit more history here. is this a new project? has it been working before? etc. It might be worth creating a new test project from scratch that is clean and see the behavior.

[Greg Johnson]

@Jack Brickey Some background:  we are migrating to JSD from Zendesk, and went live without realising that the email support in JSD was really quite poor.  We operate a public helpdesk (not logins, no account necessary) where any of our customers can email support@ to get help.

Unfortunately, when we comment on their issue and include attachments, these are not included in the outgoing email but rather sent as links that require authentication to obtain.  This doesn't work for our customers or us.

We know there are open issues begging Atlassian to include attachments rather than linking to them (and in fact Zendesk has faced the same revolt and has just implemented this themselves).

In the mean time, we found JETI which appeared to answer our concerns.  However, it is considerably more powerful/complex than we need and our configuration is causing us some confusion.

The main issue @Jon Taylor is referring to is that when an outside customer send a _reply_, they receive, within 2 minutes, a copy of that reply sent back to them.  This might be behaviour that would be expected if "Acknowledge new comments" was enabled in the JETI Mail Handler, but it is disabled.  We can see that outgoing email in the JETI Email Log, and it is being triggered by the Issue Commented event.

It appears that an email is being sent to the customer on ALL comments, regardless of whether we (the agent) wrote them inside Jira, or if the customer submitted one via email.  We want the email to the customer to ONLY occur on agent activity inside Jira - we do NOT need the customer to receive a copy of their own email submission.

Does that make sense?  Or add to the confusion?

[Jack Brickey]

@Greg Johnson, thanks for the detail. I assume you and Jon are a team. :-)

I have been slammed w/ my normal day job today so have not been able to get back to this. My current confusion is not understanding why the commenter is getting notified of their own comment. I don't see this in my instance so am trying to understand why you are experiencing this. Now, the one important new piece of info is that you are using JETI which was missing from the thread previously. I don't use JETI so expect maybe (?) there is a smoking gun here. I'm going to ping other champions to see if they use JETI and/or have thoughts on your issue.