How to support email addresses with international characters

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Oct 18, 2022 by Ryan Clifton
3 min read



This issue has been resolved by Atlassian in Jira versions: 7.6.6, 7.7.4, 7.8.4, 7.9.3, 7.10.1
See Jira Server issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-67175

Please only proceed with these steps if you are unable to update Jira.

Summary

Jira ships with a mail handling library called JavaMail, but version 1.5.6 of the library doesn't support email addresses with international characters, such as:

élliöt@test.com

Version 1.6.0 of javamail  support was added for non-ASCII characters in email addresses.  A request has been logged to upgrade this library in Jira (JRASERVER-67175) but until Atlassian does this, the only way to support accented characters is to upgrade the Java Mail library manually at your own risk!

Updating core libraries is not supported by Atlassian and may have unexpected/hidden consequences.

We have tested this with Jira 7.9.0 and JEMH 2.6.5.  If you are using an older version of Jira, your mileage may vary.

Detecting the problem / showing the fix works

The following screenshots come from the JEMH Auditing view. Access the Processing Detail report through the icon shown below when hovering on an audit row.

 



Area

Broken

Working

Area

Broken

Working

Processing Report

 

 

Test Cases

 

 

Instructions

1

Download the following files:

  1. https://maven.java.net/content/repositories/public/com/sun/mail/javax.mail/1.6.1/javax.mail-1.6.1.jar

  2. https://maven.java.net/content/repositories/public/com/sun/mail/mailapi/1.6.1/mailapi-1.6.1.jar

2

Close down the instance of Jira that you are currently using.
Archive these files outside of the Jira installation to allow recovery.

  1. atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/javax.mail-1.5.6.jar

  2. atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/javax.mail-api-1.5.6.jar

3

Copy the 2 previously downloaded files into the "atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib" folder of your Jira installation.



4

Start Jira and ensure that JEMH is up to date (at least version 2.6.5)



5

Check the international characters work by creating a Test Case with an email such as:

élliöt@test.com

6

You should see in the list of Test Cases that the email address with international characters appears correctly.
If the characters are replaced by different or extra characters, the above has not worked. 



Applicable JEMH versions

  • 2.6.5

Tested actions

These actions were test with an international character present in the email of a Watcher, Reporter, Assignee and also when contained in a Custom Field.

  • Create Issue (as Reporter)

  • Change assignee

  • Create comment

  • Edit Description

  • Attach file

  • Edit Custom Field

  • Edit Sprint

Related articles

See JavaMail 1.6.0 Release Notes