Outgoing email to group should be sent to the associated distribution list not to all the individual users

In a JIRA setup where a User Directory is configured to sync with a corporate LDAP or Active Directory database, distribution lists are pulled into JIRA as groups, and the members of the group are the users associated with the emails in the DL. However, when a notification is sent to one of those groups, it turns into many emails to all the individual members of the group instead of one email to the DL associated with the group. This is very undesirable.

It is problematic in situations where the mail servers are configured with a limit on the number of emails that can be generated from a particular IP address. In our case, our servers are set to only allow 200 emails/minute and we are now hitting this limit frequently. Our mail admins will not increase this limit, saying:

This limit helps prevent internal applications from inadvertently creating an internal DoS attack on our messaging servers. So the raising of the submission rate is not an option as this will affect corporate wide email services.

The way JIRA handles emails is not correct. They should send to the distribution list’s SMTP address so exchange can expand the list and send the messages as needed. This also bypasses all our security controls that are in place to prevent users from sending to DLs with a high number of members that are restricted.

We would very much like to see this behavior changed so that notifications to a group (we have several instances where this happens) send only one email to the distribution list associated with the group instead of many emails to the individual members of the group.