How to configure Outgoing Mail for the free plan?
Asked by Vlad Liberman:

Hi everyone,

We're thinking about using Jira as our project management system. We decided to start with the free plan as a first step. According to the documentation, notifications are available for the free plan with some limitations.

In order to get notifications, we need to set up an SMTP server first. However, this requires System Administrator permissions while the free plan only provides Product Administrator permissions.

Does anybody know how to set up Outgoing Mail for the free plan?

Thanks


Answers:
author: Vlad Liberman
body: Hi Trudy,

We subscribed to the Jira Software product (free plan) and created a Scrum project for our needs. Initially, we thought that notification emails didn't need any additional settings. However, we didn't receive any emails despite setting project notifications. Then we found the following link <https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/configuring-an-smtp-mail-server-to-send-notifications-947184044.html>. The second paragraph on the page states that Jira System Administrators permission is required to configure an SMTP mail server to send notifications.

Could you tell us how to make email notifications available?

Thanks


author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Vlad Liberman](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5121005)

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Can you confirm for us whether you subscribed to the Jira Work Management product or the Jira Software product?

Can you provide a link to the documentation you are referencing?

comments: author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Vlad Liberman](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5121005)

The document you have referenced is for Jira Server/Data Center, not for Jira Cloud. Notice in the upper right corner the buttons labeled "Cloud" and "Data Center and Server v9.5". The Data Center button is highlighted. When looking at documents you need to make sure you are looking at ones that have the Cloud button highlighted.

Do you have Outgoing Email enabled? Go to the following page to check.

(substitute your instance URL where it says "something.atlassian.net")

```
https://something.atlassian.net/secure/admin/OutgoingMailServers.jspa
```

If Outgoing Email is enabled, next check your Personal Settings to confirm that you have not disabled email there. Each user can go to this page (substituting your URL again).

```
https://something.atlassian.net/secure/ViewPersonalSettings.jspa
```

Under the heading "Email notifications for issue activity" make sure it is set to "Send me email notifications"

Below that are some check boxes for your general preferences for notifications you want to receive. For instance, if you DON'T want to receive notifications for activity that you initiate, then you would uncheck the box for "You make changes to the issue". Start by making sure all these boxes are checked. Note that changes you make will only affect future notifications. It will not retroactively send you notifications for past activity.

There are default Notification rules/schemes that will be set up when you create a new project. I'm assuming that you have not changed those, but if you have, please let us know.

Next you need to double check that Jira is configured to send notifications for specific activities for issues in projects. You can use the Notification Helper to confirm that for a given user, issue, and activity, Jira is configured to send a notification.

<https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/use-the-jira-admin-helper/>

And finally, if all the above is set up affirmatively and the Notification Helper indicates that a notifications should be send to a specific user for a specific action on a specific issue, then try executing that action on that issue to see if the user does receive a notification.

If that doesn't reveal the solution to your problem, please let us know and we'll dig into a specific notification scenario.

It is also possible that email addresses have been blacklisted on the Atlassian side, which would require Atlassian assistance to fix. But first let us check the items above.


author: Julian Grad
body: The button to configure the SMTP server for outgoing e-mails does not appear. Am I doing something wrong?  
![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/240253i2CA47BFC02ADBEA7/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/240254iC50F062ED83C54AD/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")


author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Julian Grad](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5147484)

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Are you working with Jira Cloud or Jira Server/Data Center? If your URL looks similar to this:

https://*yourCompany* .**atlassian.net**

...then you are using Jira Cloud.

With Jira Cloud you do not set up an SMTP server for outgoing email. That is handled automatically as part of the Jira Cloud product.


author: Julian Grad
body: Hello,  
thanks for your feedback. Yes - mine is like this. But the e-mail notifications still do not work? And I have read that this is because of the not-configured SMTP server. I have already adjusted notifications according to instructions. I am using a free plan.

Thanks for your help.


author: Trudy Claspill
body: Please provide a link to the documentation where you read that your problem could be due to the not-configured SMTP server. I suspect that you are looking at documentation that applies only to Jira Server or Jira Data Center, not to Jira Cloud.

If you are having issues related to the delivery of emails from a Jira Cloud system, please start your own new Question in this community, so that we can ask you for information relevant to your scenario without impinging on or confusing the assistance be offered to Vlad on this thread.


Tags: cloud

jira-work-management-cloud