NOTE: This suggestion is for Confluence Cloud. Using Confluence Server? See the corresponding suggestion.

Response from development

This is the way the system was designed. In an email that contains a 'diff', macros will not render, instead they show the parameters of the macro. In a non-diff email (like when a page is first created), the macro is rendered.

So if a user watches a whole space, when a page is created with a JIRA Issues Macro on it, they will see the list in the email, but if the page is edited, they will not.

The development team has discussed this before and decided against it, because in a 'diff' email, it may lead people to believe that the editor had made changes to the issues themselves, not to the macro parameters. They believe the macro parameters are more useful in a diff email than rendering the macro, so this will not be changed.