Sometimes, you as the administrator may need to send out e-mails to a wide audience for important messages. For example, if you are planning for some maintenance work that will take JIRA offline for an extended period of time, then you may want to send out e-mails to all JIRA users to let them know of the outage.

JIRA has a built-in facility, where you can manually send out e-mails to specific groups of users. There are two options when manually sending e-mails—you can either send based on groups or by projects.

When sending by groups, all you have to do is select one or more groups in JIRA, and all users that belong to the selected groups will receive the e-mail. Users belonging to more than one group will not get duplicated e-mails.

When sending by projects, you have to first select one or more projects, and then the project roles. We will discuss project roles in more detail in the next chapter; for now, you can think of them as groups of users within projects. So, for example, you can send e-mails to all users that are a part of the demonstration project rather than all the users in JIRA.

The following screenshot shows an example of sending e-mails by group, where you send an outage notification to all members of the jira-user group, which is the default group for all JIRA users: