Notifications

The bell in the header tells you when someone else did something to your things. It is deliberately narrow: only events involving another person appear, so your own uploads, renames and deletions never ring it. Those are in your activity log instead.

#What raises one

The last three come from signature requests. Two rules apply to all of them:

• You are never told about your own action. Leaving a note on your own file rings nobody's bell, including yours.
• Nobody is told twice about one event. An owner who has also written in a note thread hears about a new note once, and re-sharing something with somebody who already has it is silent.

#Reading them

The bell shows a count of unread notifications. Opening it lists the most recent thirty, newest first; clicking one marks it read and goes to the item — /view/<id> for a note, Shared with me for a share. Mark all as read clears the count without opening anything.

The list is fetched when the page loads and refreshed once a minute. There is no live push channel, so a notification can be up to a minute old when it appears — a deliberate trade, since pushing would mean running a pub/sub that a single-container install does not otherwise need.

#Choosing where they reach you

Settings → General → Notifications has one row per kind of notification and one column per place it can reach you:

The same grid is in the mobile app, under Settings → General, and a change in one shows in the other.

Out of the box every kind rings the bell and reaches your phone. Something shared with you, and the outcome of a signature request you made, are emailed too, since they are addressed to you by name; comments and notes are not emailed unless you turn that on, and neither is a request to sign, whose link already comes by email. Turning In the app off for a kind also stops it reaching your phone: the app finds new notifications by asking the server for the ones the bell keeps.

By email is disabled, with a note saying so, unless an administrator has configured outgoing mail — see the SMTP section of Environment. If mail is removed afterwards the choices stay set but nothing is sent, rather than failing quietly in a way that looks like lost notifications.

A failed email never affects the action that caused it: the notification is recorded, the bell still rings, and the mail failure is logged.

#Notes on behaviour

• Notifications are per person, not per drive. In simple mode everyone shares one drive but each account keeps its own bell, so a note left on the shared drive reaches the drive's owner rather than everybody.
• They outlive the people in them. The actor's name is stored as it read when the event happened, so deleting an account does not blank out the history of what it did.
• Deleting an account removes that account's own notifications. They are addressed to it and mean nothing without it.