How to See All Of Your JIRA Notifications In One Place

In JIRA it's possible to @ somebody in a ticket or comment. By default this will trigger an email notification which will soon arrive in the designated person's inbox. Personally I only check email twice a day and when doing so am not interested in being distracted by immediately responding to a JIRA comment or question. Instead I review any outstanding JIRA inquiries once each morning, and then again later in the day depending upon the priority.

To easily review all comments/tickets which require my attention, I've long used a custom JQL (JIRA Query Language) filter called "Mentions of me, me, me":

Custom JIRA filter

The custom JQL looks like this:

project in (INSERT-PROJECT-NAME-HERE) and (summary ~ currentUser() OR description ~ currentUser() OR comment ~ currentUser()) order by created DESC

To create your own custom filter, follow these steps:

  • Login to JIRA, click on the Filters menu item in the navbar, and select "View all issues".
  • Click the "New search" menu item located on the left side of the screen.
  • Make sure the JQL button is clicked on the right side of the screen (it is by default), then paste the above JQL into the search field located at the top of the screen, replacing INSERT-PROJECT-NAME-HERE with the abbreviation used for your JIRA project name. You can view these abbreviations by clicking on the "Projects" menu dropdown located in the navbar. The abbreviation is found in the parentheses following the project name.
  • This is important: after pasting in the JQL, you need to press the Enter/Return key before saving the filter! Chalk this up to the usual JIRA UX insanity. Then press the Save filter button and you should see a modal window that looks like this:
Saving a custom JIRA filter

Give your filter a name, and leave the other settings intact presuming you'd like the filter to remain private. After pressing Save, your custom filter will appear under the Filters menu in the navbar!

Viewing JIRA Notifications From Multiple Projects

If you'd like to see JIRA notifications for multiple projects, all you need to do is modify the JQL to include a comma-delimited list of project abbreviations:

project in (ABBR1, ABBR2, ABBR3) and (summary ~ currentUser() OR description ~ currentUser() OR comment ~ currentUser()) order by created DESC