I got very confused a while back, because Jira sends an HTML only email, containing a diff, where removed text is shown with a strikethrough. Could stricken text perhaps be wrapped in HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D) characters? E.g. Foo -bar- baz Foo -bar baz- Or perhaps using the Markdown convention? Foo ~~bar~~ baz This, personally, would have saved me from quite a bit of grief and embarrassment, until I eventually realised that a particular workflow status didn't exist (and was actually an amalgamation of two similarly named statuses!)