Recommended JIRA Settings for Time Doctor Integration

Once you have integrated your company's JIRA account with your Time Doctor account, there are two changes to your JIRA account that we strongly suggest you make to ensure that things work smoothly.

1. Turn off JIRA email notifications about time tracked with Time Doctor.

Configuring email notifications

Before you begin: You must be logged in as a user with the Administer Jira global permission.

If you're not a Jira admin, you can manage the email notifications you receive in your personal settings. Learn more.

Email notifications

Enabling email notifications

The email address from which notifications are sent can also be configured for each project. See Creating a notification scheme for more information.

Disabling email notifications

Jira projects use notification schemes to send email notifications about project activity. There are two ways to disable email notifications for a given project:

  1. Remove the notification scheme entirely from a project. 
  2. Edit a project's notification scheme so that no emails are sent. Take care when editing a scheme as more than one project may be using it. Read more about creating and editing a notification scheme.

To remove a notification scheme from a project:

  1. From your project's sidebar, select Project settings > Notifications.
  2. Select Actions > Use a different scheme.
  3. In the Schemes dropdown, select None.
  4. Select Associate.

Configure a project's sender email address

You can configure the sender email address for a Jira Cloud project. This will also serve as the reply address for responses to notifications, which can work in conjunction with Creating issues and comments from email.

When you set the  sender address for a project, all notifications are sent from this address. This setting is specific to the project and won't affect the configuration of other projects.

The 'Sender Address' for a project can be configured as follows:

  1. Choose the Jira icon (, , , or ) > Projects.
  2. Select Settings > Summary.
  3. Under the Notifications section and click the pencil icon to the right of the Email address.
  4. In the resulting Project Email Address dialog box, enter a valid email address in the Email field, and click Update.

This email address will now be used as the sender address in all email notifications sent by this project. You can revert to the default email address by leaving the  Email field blank.

Email recipients

For each event notification, Jira will only send the first encountered email intended for a recipient. Hence, in the case where a user is included in two or more recipient lists (e.g. the  Project Lead and current reporter) for one event notification, the user will only receive the first encountered email notification. Jira will log the fact that this user was on multiple recipient lists.

User control over email notifications

Each user on your Jira Cloud site (including you) can choose to turn off email notifications for  certain situations, to reduce the amount of email they get from Jira. For example, they can configure their personal settings to get an email when someone mentions them but not for activity on issues where they're the reporter.

By default, they'll get email updates for issue activity when:

  • They’re watching the issue
  • They’re the reporter
  • They’re the assignee for the issue
  • Someone mentions them

If they  don't want email updates for any of those situations, they can uncheck the relevant checkbox. For example, if they only want emails when someone mentions them, they should uncheck all the checkboxes apart from the Someone mentions you checkbox.

Jira's default setting is to not notify users of their own changes. This can be changed on a per user basis via their profile preferences.

Email HTML formatting

Each Jira user can specify in their personal settings whether to send outgoing emails in text or HTML format.  Jira Administrators can specify a default email format:

  1. Choose the Jira icon (, , , or ) > Jira settings > System.
  2. Select Default user preferences.
  3. Select Edit default values.
  4. In the Email format dropdown, choose either text or html.
  5. Select Update.

Troubleshooting email notifications

The Jira admin helper can help you diagnose why a user isn't receiving email notifications when they should be, or why a user is receiving email notifications when they shouldn't be. This tool is only available to Jira administrators.

To diagnose why a user is or is not receiving notifications for an issue:

  1. Choose the Jira icon (, , , or ) > Jira settings > System.
  2. Select Notification helper.

Jira can send a maximum of 100 emails per day on the Free plan, then email notifications will be paused until the following day. You can upgrade your plan to allow for more email notifications. If you're trialing Standard or Premium and need to increase your daily email limit, contact our support team.

2. Allow work time to be added to closed JIRA issues.

Why should you do this?
When you track time in Time Doctor, there is a delay of up to an hour before that time is synced with JIRA. In JIRA, tracked time cannot be added to closed JIRA issues by default. So, if you track time on a JIRA issue with Time Doctor and then close the JIRA issue before Time Doctor syncs, the tracked time will not be added to JIRA.

How to do this: