Crowd Server Fails to Send E-mails

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Symptoms

When setting the email configurations using the Crowd Admin Console (not a JNDI email resource), Crowd attempts to send an email and the process fails causing the following message to be recorded in the logs:

1 Could not send email to email@example.com. Reason:Invalid Addresses

Cause

The SMTP Server requires authentication. However Crowd is not setting its SMTP messages to authenticate.

Resolution

Solution 1

Modify Crowd's <Crowd-Install>/apache-tomcat/bin/setenv.bat (or setenv.sh if Linux) file, adding the following parameter to the JAVA_OPTS:

1 -Dmail.smtp.auth=true

For example:

1 set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Xms128m -Xmx256m -Dmail.smtp.auth=true -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

Then, restart Crowd.

Solution 2

Instead of using the normal UI configuration, use a JNDI Resource.

Updated on April 15, 2025

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