it would be great if we could configure Jira to query Active Directory for distribution group membership when a email list is added to a Jira issue.
e.g. we often have the need to add an email mailing list address as a watcher to a Jira issue so that a logical group of staff are all kept up to date on an issue. the problem arises when an individual who is also a member of said mail list is listed individually as the reporter, the owner, or a watcher of an issue; in this case that person can receive multiple copies of the message. if Jira were to query AD to see that the reporter (e.g. user "x" with email addr "x@abc.com") is also a member of the email list (e.g. "abc@abc.com") which is specified as a watcher, then Jira could determine that it does not need to send mail to "x@abc.com" as the mail sent to "abc@abc.com" will already hit "x@abc.com".
of course this gets very complicated when multiple mail lists are involved or when lists have sub-lists.
as an alternative, if Jira sent email to all addresses as one message, rather than one message per address, then most MTAs and/or MUAs are smart enough to weed out duplicates.
An interetsing feature.
The reason why we send one message per user is that sometimes it is useful to ensure that the recipient o fthe email does not know who the other recipient are. Including everyone as a BCC make the e-mail appear as if it is not addressed to anyone. (Different users also have different preferences for HTML or text e-mail, so we might have to sned multiple messages anyway).
If you have access to JIRA's source code (hold commercial license) you are more than welcome to add AD querying to JIRA.
THanks,
Anton