This weekend I upgraded a Jira instance from one LTS release to the next (8.13.1 to 8.20.1).
Everything appeared to go well, but shortly afterwards users started complaining: Jira is not emailing certain users.
I checked, and sure enough: there's a situation where Jira 8.13.x and all prior releases would email, but Jira 8.20.x will not.
Specifically, this affects users like this one, who are not in a group like jira-users blessed with 'Application access':
The 'helpdesk' user here is, per Crowdsourcing triage: A useful pattern for Jira issue ownership, an account that never logs in but does get emailed.
What should happen if a new issue is created, assigned to 'helpdesk', or with 'helpdesk' as a watcher?
- In Jira 8.13.x, a notification would go out to
helpdesk@mycompany.com - In Jira 8.20.x no notification goes out.
The 8.20.x behaviour is actually correct. An account without Browse permission shouldn't get emails. Yet this important bug fix is not one of the
Getting issues... fixed between 8.13.1 and 8.20.1 - at least, that I can see.
Anyhow, to know whether your Jira has any user accounts like this, run the following SQL (Postgres-flavoured):
select user_name FROM cwd_user JOIN cwd_membership ON child_id=cwd_user.id JOIN cwd_group ON cwd_group.id=cwd_membership.parent_id WHERE cwd_user.active=1 AND cwd_user.id not in (select child_id from cwd_membership JOIN licenserolesgroup ON licenserolesgroup.group_id=cwd_membership.lower_parent_name);
If you get output, that's bad - those users will stop getting emails in 8.20.x+. Time to fix your group memberships, or bless the group your users are in (here 'MyCompany') with application access.