Question 1

Is MailWatch an email log?

Accepted Answer

No. Atlassian exposes no API for the delivery status of native mail (JSDCLOUD-4698, open since 2017), so a per-message log is not something any tool can honestly offer. MailWatch tells you the channel is broken before your customers do; it cannot prove that the reply on ticket #4711 was delivered.

Question 2

How is MailWatch different from a notification log app?

Accepted Answer

Notification log apps record the events Jira fires, which is useful for showing what was attempted. Firing is not delivery: during a real outage those logs keep filling with sent rows while customers receive nothing, and nothing pages you. MailWatch verifies arrival at a real mailbox, end to end, and alerts you outside Jira email the moment either loop stops completing. Some teams run both.

Question 3

How fast does it detect a broken channel?

Accepted Answer

With the fast preset, worst case detection is about 15 minutes, and the app shows the honest bound for each channel rather than promising "instant". In a real test on a live site, a silently broken channel was detected and paged in 10 minutes, and the recovery was announced automatically. A healthy inbound loop typically completes in about 6 seconds.

Question 4

What permissions does it need?

Accepted Answer

Standard Jira work scopes, the same family every Forge app requests to read and write issues. The code only ever touches its own canary issues, it declares a single external endpoint, and the manifest is public, so you can check both claims before installing.

Question 5

Does it change my mail flow?

Accepted Answer

No. Nothing is migrated, no forwarding rules are added, and no DNS changes are made. MailWatch sends a real canary email to the intake address you already use and reads only what it created itself. Your customers' mail takes exactly the path it took before.

Question 6

Who gets paged, and how?

Accepted Answer

Whoever you point it at, through channels that do not depend on Jira email: a Slack webhook, or any external inbox. Every alert carries the time of the last successful delivery, so you know how long the channel has been quiet, not just that it is.

Question 7

What does it cost?

Accepted Answer

Nothing right now: MailWatch is free on the Atlassian Marketplace, with no site limit. Paid plans will come later, announced at least 30 days ahead, and no site moves to a paid plan unless its admin approves it.

Question 8

What Jira setups does it work with?

Accepted Answer

MailWatch is a Forge app, so it runs on Jira Cloud. It watches the native email channel: the inbound loop targets a project's email intake address, and the outbound loop uses a standing request in a Jira Service Management project whose notifications go to a mailbox MailWatch controls.

Question 9

How do I remove it?

Accepted Answer

Two clicks: uninstall the Forge app from your site's app management screen. Nothing was migrated, so there is nothing to migrate back. The canary customer and its canary issues stay in your site as ordinary records, and you can delete them whenever you like.