"Who exactly has access to our Jira instance right now? 🙃 🤪"
- Your Boss

This question keeps Atlassian admins up at night. Look at your user list and you may find a concerning mix – your employees alongside contractors, partners, former team members with personal Gmail accounts, and random users nobody remembers inviting. Worse, with multiple admins across different teams independently granting access, you've created an environment where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.

This invisible security gap creates a significant challenge: How do you maintain security and governance when your Atlassian environment has become a revolving door of users from various organizations, with multiple admins making independent access decisions?

The answer lies in one of the most reliable identifiers in any Atlassian environment: email domains.

Email domains tell you exactly where a user comes from—whether they're part of your organization (@yourcompany.com), a contractor (@consultingfirm.com), a partner (@partner.com), or using a personal email (@gmail.com). With the Admin Automations powerful email domain filtering capabilities, you can finally implement consistent governance based on this critical identifier.

The Email Domain Governance Challenge

Most Atlassian administrators face these common challenges:

• Mixed environments with both corporate and external users

• Limited control over who gets invited by well-meaning team members

• Surprise changes from Atlassian that create new ways for well-meaning team members to invite others

• No systematic way to identify and manage users from specific domains

• Manual processes that can't keep pace with user growth

• Security risks from unmanaged external access

Without automated governance, these challenges typically lead to security gaps, compliance issues, and administrative headaches. Here’s how email domain filtering transforms this situation.

Powerful Use Cases for Email Domain Filtering

Admin Automations email domain filtering capabilities support a wide range of governance scenarios:

1. Automatically Managing External Collaborators

Create rules that automatically identify and control access for users from partner or vendor domains:

1. Select all users where email domain equals [partner.com] or [vendor.com]
2. Then add to [external-collaborators] group
3. Run daily

This ensures external collaborators are properly classified and can be managed as a single group.

2. Enforcing Security Policies for Personal Email Accounts

Many organizations have policies restricting what users with personal email accounts can access:

1. Select all users where email domain equals [gmail.com] or [hotmail.com]
2. Then suspend user access
3. Run daily

This rule automatically enforces your security policy regarding personal email accounts.

You could also so this by selecting all users without a @yourcompany.com email address:

1. Select all users 
2. Filter to exclude users where email domain equals [yourcompany.com] 
3. Then suspend user access 
4. Run daily

This rule automatically enforces your security policy regarding non-company email accounts.

3. Regional Access Management

For multinational organizations, email domain filtering can help manage regional access:

1. Select all users where email domain equals [yourcompany.co.uk] 
2. Then add to [uk-region] group 
3. Run weekly

This enables automated region-specific access management based on country-specific email domains.

A similar filter can be done for any user with a UK email domain extension:

1. Select all users where email domain contains [.uk] 
2. Then add to [uk-region] group
3. Run weekly

4. Contractor Lifecycle Management

When working with contractors who use their company email domains, you can automate the entire lifecycle:

1. Select all users where email domain equals [contractor.com] 
2. Filter to exclude users in [active-projects] group 
3. Then remove from [jira-software-users] group 
4. Run weekly

This ensures contractors only retain access while actively assigned to projects.

You can also schedule one-time actions for specific domains, such as removing all contractors access on their contract end date.

1. Select all users where email domain equals [contractor.com] 
2. Run once on [contract-end-date] 
3. Then suspend user access

5. Acquisition Integration

During mergers and acquisitions, email domain filtering helps manage the transition:

1. Select all users where email domain equals acquired-company.com 
2. Then add to [migration-communication] group 
3. Run once

This helps target communication and manage access during organizational changes.

How Admin Automations Email Domain Filtering Works

Admin Automations offers two powerful approaches to email domain filtering:

Select Users by Email Domain

This selection component allows you to begin your automation rule by targeting users based on their email domains:

You can use either:

• Domain Contains: Matches partial domain strings. e.g.

  • "company" would match company.com , company.co.uk, subdomain.company.com, etc.

  • “.uk” would match company.co.uk

  • “.” would match all users

  • “subdomain” would match subdomain.company.com

• Exact Domain: Matches only the specific domains you list (e.g. exactly "gmail.com")

Filter Users by Email Domain

This filter component can be applied after other selection criteria to refine your target user group:

The filter includes the same options as the selection component, plus an "Exclude Mode" that inverts the filter—targeting users who DON'T have the specified email domains.

Getting Started with Email Domain Governance

Ready to take control of your environment with email domain filtering? Here's how to get started:

1. Audit your current state – Run a report to identify all email domains currently in your Atlassian environment

2. Classify your domains – Categorize domains as internal, approved partners, contractors, personal, etc.

3. Define your policies – Determine what access levels are appropriate for each category

4. Implement baseline rules – Start with simple rules for the highest-risk categories (typically personal email accounts)

5. Expand your governance – Gradually add more sophisticated rules for different domain categories

Remember, email domain governance is not about restricting collaboration—it's about ensuring collaboration happens securely and according to your organization's policies.

Ready to take control of your Atlassian environment with email domain filtering? Try Admin Automations today and start building your domain governance strategy.

You can also read more about more Admin Automations use cases on our website.