This page lists all known limitations that are currently unresolved. For a list of resolved limitations, please see Resolved Issues.

General Limitations

Limitations that might affect normal usage of S/Notify in Jira or Confluence

There are currently no known limitations in this category.

Marginal Limitations

Limitations that occur only under very specific circumstances

Alias not found in S/MIME keystore

Preconditions

• you use S/MIME encryption

• you want to decrypt incoming mail or sign outgoing mail (or both)

• in Server Key Management, you have configured a PKCS#12 keystore (file suffix pfx or p12)

Description

The issue appears only under rare circumstances which we haven’t been able to reproduce on our end. Please contact us to provide any input if you happen to be affected by this issue.

In these circumstances, if you run Verify Settings, an error displays saying that the private key with alias <some alias> was not found in the keystore.

Resolution

We are currently collecting more information to find out why this happens and how to fix it programmatically. Until then, please apply the work-around described below.

Work-around

The keystore can be fixed using the Java keytool utility like so:

This causes the keytool utility to read the original keystore and create a copy that has the internal issues fixed. Configure S/Notify to use this fixed copy.

LDAP: Unprocessed Continuation Reference(s)

Preconditions

• you use Active Directory

• you have multiple catalogs connected in your Active Directory setup

Description

Under the above circumstances, the retrieval of S/MIME certificates from the Active Directory may fail with an error message saying: Unprocessed Continuation Reference(s).

This means that Active Directory has returned additional directories to look at (a so-called referral), but the client did not follow it. With referral chasing enabled in Active Directory, the client could go from domain to domain in the Active Directory tree trying to satisfy the request if the query cannot be satisfied by the initial domain. This method can be extremely time-consuming, which is why S/Notify does not perform referral chasing, but Active Directory does not accept that and throws an error when the client does not follow the referral.

Resolution

S/Notify should ignore the referral error. However, this is being prepared for the next release.

If, however, it is required to follow referrals in order to search the whole Active Directory, it is recommended to use Active Directory's Global Catalog instead, which is much faster. To connect to the Global Catalog, in the LDAP connection setup, replace 389 by port 3268, or port 686 by 3269, respectively.

Work-around

Use Active Directory's Global Catalog. To connect to the Global Catalog, in the LDAP connection setup, replace 389 by port 3268, or port 686 by 3269, respectively.

Duplicate email addresses

Preconditions

• you have two or more users sharing the same email address

• and user uploads are allowed

Description

If, in your Jira or Confluence, multiple users share the same email address, S/Notify cannot determine which of these users the email is actually meant for. Usually, this doesn't matter, because all these users would have to share the same S/MIME certificate or PGP key anyway, as these are bound to the email address. 

As a consequence, if S/Notify is to use an S/MIME certificate or PGP key uploaded to the user profile, the upload should be made to the user profiles of all users with that email address. When uploading different S/MIME certificates or PGP keys to users that share the same email address, it is undetermined which of them will be used to encrypt an email.

Note that this is not a problem if S/Notify is configured to get S/MIME certificates and PGP keys from a key store or key server rather than from the user profile.

Resolution

In the unlikely case that different users with the same email address have uploaded different S/MIME certificates or PGP keys, it is impossible to determine which of them is the desired one for a specific email. Therefore, this specific issue cannot be resolved completely by the app.

However, S/Notify displays a warning in the user profile if there is another active user using that email address.

Work-around

Different users having the same email address should not have different S/MIME certificates or PGP keys uploaded to their user profile.

Invites in encrypted emails not visible in MS Outlook

Preconditions

• outbound email encrypted with S/MIME

• outgoing mail contains an ics file attachment for an invite

• recipient views message in Microsoft Outlook client

Description

Note that this issue is not specific to S/Notify, but it occurs with any invite in an encrypted email viewed in Microsoft Outlook.

If an encrypted message contains an invite, the invite cannot be seen in a Microsoft Outlook client. If the message is not encrypted, the invite works as expected.

This is a long-standing problem in the Microsoft Outlook client. Outlook tries to recognize invites in order to present a dialog to accept or deny them. However, to do so, Outlook relies on a message header with Content-Type: text/calendar, but when a message is encrypted, this message header is inside the encrypted part. Obviously, Outlook does not decrypt the message when checking for that header, but later nonetheless hides the corresponding ics file attachment. As a result, neither the dialog nor the attachment can be seen, and the invite seems to have disappeared.

Resolution

There is no working solution. Microsoft needs to fix this, but hasn’t yet.

Work-around

As the only existing work-around, Microsoft always sends invites unencrypted.

You can configure S/Notify to send emails unencrypted when they include ics attachments. Refer to Advanced Settings | Key skipEncryptionRegex for the relevant setting and reach out to our service desk if you run into this problem.

PGP: GnuPG keybox format

Preconditions

• you use GnuPG 2.1 or newer which stores its PGP keyring in the new keybox format

• you want to use the same GnuPG keystore file with S/Notify

Description

Under the above circumstances, S/Notify accepts the keystore file, but cannot read any keys from the keystore.

When you hit Verify Settings, it returns: IOException - invalid armor.

Resolution

S/Notify does not currently support the new keybox format. However, it is being prepared for the next feature release.

Work-around

Either configure GnuPG to use the old keystore format, or export the keys in ASCII-armored or (old) GPG binary format.

PGP: AEAD encrypted emails cannot be decrypted

Preconditions

• inbound email encrypted with PGP

• the email is encrypted using the new AEAD method

Description

Decryptions fails. The log file shows an error unknown packet type 20.

GnuPG 2.3 generates keys with an AEAD algorithm, and GnuPG 2.3 by default uses this algorithm to encrypt. However, to date, while AEAD is proposed to become part of the OpenPGP standard, it has not been approved yet (see OpenPGP Message Format Draft rfc4880bis-10). To the best of our knowledge, it is not yet broadly supported. Applications based on GnuPG usually still use GnuPG 2.2 under the hood.

Resolution

We are working to include AEAD support in the next feature release of S/Notify.

Work-around

In GnuPG 2.3, the --rfc4880 or --openpgp flag must be used so it conforms to the PGP standard.

PGP: No indicators added for one-pass signatures

Preconditions

• inbound email encrypted with PGP

• the email is encrypted with a one-pass signature (packet tag 4 according to RFC 4880, the Flowcrypt GMail extension is known to use this)

• S/Notify is configured to “add indicators” to issues from incoming mails

Description

The message is decrypted, but the signature symbol is not added.

Resolution

We are planning to improve one-pass signature support in a future release of S/Notify.

Work-around

Use conventional detached signatures.

Third-party App Limitations

Limitations that might occur in combination with other apps

Note that S/Notify is designed in a way that allows for maximum compatibility with other apps sending or receiving emails. Although we cannot guarantee compatibility with any app out there, we will always do our best to provide you with a solution, should you run into any issues. Apps that use the standard mail functionality of Jira or Confluence should always work without problems.

Jira Email This Issue

The app Jira Email This Issue (also known as: JETI) significantly extends Jira’s mail functionality.

• S/Notify Email Encryption works seemlessly with the Classic Mail Handler in Jira Email This Issue

• If Jira Email This Issue is used with its own custom built-in mail handler of this app, a patch is required to make it work with S/Notify Email Encryption (see description under Work-around)

Incoming mail with JETI Next Gen Mail Handler

Precondition

• Jira Email This Issue app is configured to receive emails over its own built-in Next Gen Mail Handler

Description

S/Notify is not being invoked by the Next Gen mail handler. As a result

• incoming mail cannot be decrypted

• signature attachments cannot be removed

• indicators cannot be added

Resolution

We have proposed a solution to the vendor of Email This Issue to make S/Notify and JETI Next Gen Mail Handlers compatible with each other. Customers interested in the integration are encouraged to upvote the feature request for Email This Issue here and/or to contact META-INF, the vendor of Email This Issue to ask for their current progress status.

Work-around

There is a work-around using a simple patch in Email This Issue. In order to enable Email This Issue to use the email decryption handlers in S/Notify, create a text file named javamail.providers with the following contents:

or just download the file from https://download.savignano.net/snotify/jira/releases/patch/javamail.providers

Install S/Notify if not done so already (minimum version 3.6.1). Now you can apply the patch:

1. download the Email This Issue app to your computer

2. open the jar file using a ZIP utility (all jars are archives in zip format)

3. add the mail providers file to the archive under META-INF/javamail.providers

4. save and close the jar file

You have now successfully applied the patch.

Next, go to Jira administration > Manage apps, then click Upload app and select the patched jar file.

Now you can use Email This Issue to receive encrypted email and get it automatically decrypted by S/Notify.

There’s a little downside to this solution: if you ever choose to uninstall S/Notify, you will have to remember to remove the patch in Email This Issue at the same time.

Incoming encrypted mail

Precondition

• Send Email To Page app is installed in Confluence to process incoming emails

• Users send encrypted emails

Description

Incoming email won’t get decrypted because in Confluence, there is usually no support for incoming email, so S/Notify for Confluence does not include the functionality.

Resolution

While S/Notify could process incoming email with Send Email To Page, to date, we haven’t seen any requests.

Customers interested in the integration are encouraged to let us know!

Work-around

There’s no way currently. Please contact our service desk for available options.

Other Third-party Limitations

Microsoft Outlook Issues

Invalid signatures

Precondition

• Signed-only emails sent from an Outlook client are recognized as invalid and possibly tampered with

Description

The signature of signed-only (not encrypted) emails sent from a Microsoft Outlook client are shown as invalid.

This is caused by an incorrect implementation of the SMTP protocol in Outlook. A full stop character at column 1 of a message text line has a special meaning in SMTP. It is interpreted and removed by the SMTP server when the client delivers the email. Because of this, RFC 5321: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol requires hat the client adds an extra full stop character in this case. However, Outlook fails to do so, which leads to the receiving client rightly complaining about an invalid signature due to the email being modified during transport.

Resolution

Microsoft needs to fix the SMTP implementation in Outlook.

Work-around

The use of opaque signatures seems to avoid the SMTP issue. However, the latest Outlook does not seem to provide an option to use opaque signatures.

There’s no way for the receiving email client to implement a work-around.

Microsoft Exchange Issues

Invalid signatures

Precondition

• Signed-only emails sent through an Exchange server are recognized as invalid and possibly tampered with

Description

The signature of signed-only (not encrypted) emails sent through a Microsoft Exchange server are shown as invalid.

This is caused by Exchange reformatting emails, which leads to the receiving client rightly complaining about an invalid signature due to the email being modified during transport.

Resolution

Microsoft Exchange should not reformat emails at all, but at least not signed emails.

Work-around

The use of opaque signatures prevents the issue. However, the latest Outlook does not seem to provide an option to use opaque signatures.

There’s no way for the receiving email client to implement a work-around.