JIRA from address in outbound email changed to 'localhost' if you use Java 8

If you use Java 8 to run JIRA 6.3 you can find that your outbound email addresses will be of the form jwinters@localhost rather than jwinters@atlassian.com

Diagnosis

In Java 8, getLocalHost().getHostName() behaves differently from previous Java versions depending on the order of aliases in /etc/hosts.

Workaround

Changing the order of domain aliases in /etc/hosts to changes the return value of getHostName() in Java 8.

For example,

• If /etc/hosts is 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain centos57, then Java8 returns localhost for getHostName().
• If we rewrite this as 127.0.0.1 centos57 localhost.localdomain localhost then getHostName() returns centos57.