Jira 4.1 Deep Dive – Custom email subject lines

So far, my Jira 4.1 Deep Dives have covered the new user experience for tracking issues and using the operations bar, however, one of the most popular new features is the ability to customise email subject lines. At 224 votes, this issue had the most votes in the Jira 4.1 change log.

Customisable Jira emails

Jira relies on the Apache Jakarta Velocity templating engine to render the email notifications it sends out. This easy to use templating engine lets you customise email content for both HTML and plain text emails.

Why change the subject?

The subject line of Jira email notifications is set to display the email prefix (which is set in the Mail Server) followed by the subject line as defined by the template:

By default, the subject line templates display the event type, issue key and issue summary by using the following syntax:

The two most common reasons for changing the email subject lines include:

• Threaded emails – Many email clients group email messages with similar subject lines into threaded discussions or conversations. By removing the event type from the subject line, all Jira notification emails will be grouped together regardless of the event type.
• Additional fields – Many customers prefer to add custom fields, like priority or affected version, to the subject line for further grouping or filtering capabilities within their email client.

What information would you put in your subject lines? Drop a comment below to let us know how you have configured your Jira emails.

Get Jira 4.1 today

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