Why Jira never reminds your approvers (and what actually works)
Every Jira Service Management admin learns this the same way. A change request needs a manager's sign-off. Jira dutifully emails the manager an approval request — a nice one, with one-click Approve and Decline buttons. The manager is in a meeting. The email scrolls off the first screen of their inbox. And that request now sits in “Waiting for approval” forever, because Jira will never mention it again.
Not after a day. Not after a week. There is no reminder, no re-send button, no escalation. One email, ever. The feature request for approval reminders has been open on Atlassian's public tracker since 2018 — JSDCLOUD-8369, nearly 300 votes — and as of mid-2026 it still sits in “Gathering Interest.”
Why this is genuinely hard to work around
The obvious fix — “just re-send the approval email” — doesn't exist in the product. There is no API to re-trigger an approval notification. The workaround admins discovered, documented in Atlassian community threads, is remove-and-re-add: take the approver off the request and put them back, which makes Jira treat it as a fresh approval and fire the email again. It works, but doing it by hand for every stuck request is exactly the chasing job you wanted to eliminate — and doing it carelessly on a multi-approver request is how you corrupt an approval.
What the automation workaround does (and where it stops)
Atlassian's official knowledge-base workaround is a scheduled Automation rule: run a JQL search for requests pending approval, then @-mention the pending approvers in a comment. If your need is “ping people once a day,” build that rule — it's free and it works.
But teams that run real approval volume through JSM hit its edges quickly:
- It's a comment, not the approval email. An @-mention notification says “someone mentioned you.” It has no Approve button. The approver still has to find the request, open it, and locate the approval — the exact friction that lost them the first time.
- No escalation. If the approver ignores three reminders, the rule sends a fourth. Nothing ever brings in their manager or a fallback approver.
- No caps or counters. The rule can't say “Reminder 2 of 5” or stop after five. It nags identically forever, which trains people to ignore it.
- Per-project rule maintenance. Each project needs its own rule, built from custom-field smart values (
customfield_XXXXX) and JQL, and someone has to keep them working as workflows change. - No visibility. When someone asks “has anyone chased this?”, the answer is buried in comment history — there's no record of who was reminded, when, and whether it worked.
- It can't detect unreachable approvers. Here's the nasty one: an approver who has never activated their Atlassian portal account receives no email from Jira at all — not the original approval, not your automation mention. The rule will happily remind a void every day while everyone assumes the approver is just slow.
What a real fix looks like
We built Approval Nudge because we wanted the workaround finished, not repeated. It runs an hourly scan inside your Jira site (it's a Forge app in Atlassian's Runs on Atlassian program — zero data egress) and, per the settings each project admin chooses, it:
- reminds exactly the approvers who haven't answered, with honest counters (“Reminder 2 of 5”) and a hard cap;
- optionally re-sends Jira's native approval email — the one with the Approve/Decline buttons — by automating the remove-and-re-add mechanic with verification at every step and automatic rollback if any check fails;
- escalates to the contacts you chose after N days, with context;
- flags approvers who appear unreachable, so you chase them on a channel that works;
- keeps a per-request audit trail of everything it did, visible in a panel on the request.
And some things it refuses to do, on purpose: it never modifies an approval once any approver has decided (the email resend only runs while everyone is still pending — reminders for the holdouts carry on), and it never adds or swaps approvers. Approvals are governance; the app's job is to make them louder, not different.
The honest decision table
| Your situation | Use |
|---|---|
| A handful of approvals a month, one project, approvers who live in Jira | The free Automation rule. Really. |
| Approvals across several projects, SLA pressure, approvers who live in email | Approval Nudge — this is the volume where chasing becomes a job. |
| Approvers outside your Jira site who never activated portal accounts | Nothing inside Jira can email them. Approval Nudge at least tells you which ones they are. |