Notifications as Email

[Goldenflamer]

It would be very helpful if there would be an option to send notifications as emails for all the people who don't use the app.

Some Apps use notifcations and activity while in the activity also very unimportant information is sent out via email, while notifcations contain the real important stuff only. They also don't provide a way to filter.

I don't think there is more detail needed, quite simple but effective feature request would love to see it. Thanks!

[pwFoo]

Don't know if something is wrong, but I get no notifications at all. No desktop or email notifications for calendar events / invites, only frontend notification.

Is it configurable or not implemented yet? Is it notification app related or should calendar send invite emails?

I use calendar with contacts, members and testing circles, contact / member groups.

Following here to be up to date about email notifications

[pwFoo]

I think some problems here are setup related. I'll check that.
Still following here

[tig987]

I am also missing this feature.
It would be especially helpful to get update notification by email!

[nickvergessen]

That particular case is handled in nextcloud/server#3596

[jbarnoin]

I'm interested in this issue and would like to contribute, as it's very important to my use case (letting people on my small server know they have Talk messages even though they don't remember to connect very often).

After looking into it a bit and playing with some local test implementations, I'm not certain this is a great fit for how notifications currently interact with Activities, though.
Is there any place documenting the rationale for the distinction between Notifications and Activities? My worry is that since Activities can send both email and notifications, if Notifications also start sending email, there's a chance of getting double-emailed about some activity unless some care is taken to avoid it. My current local fix is to have spreed raise an Activity on chat mentions, but it might not be ideal as a general fix and leads to code duplication with Notifications (that could be cleaned up).

It makes me think this is the wrong way to think about it, and that instead anything that sends a direct Notification should instead be raising and Activity, which is then configurable as for what to do with it (send an email, a push notification, etc)

I do note that @nickvergessen mentioned in nextcloud/spreed#3076 (comment) that he doesn't think it's appropriate to send Activities for every chat message. Does this mean Activities are a lot more resource consuming than Notifications?

In the end, the ideal result I'm looking for is that a periodic email is sent if you have new unseen chat messages, or perhaps any kind of notifications, only if you haven't seen them. This could potentially be an Activity that is raised to tell you "You have these new unseen notifications in the last day" or something, that can be configured to send an email or not, and ideally with a configurable period (once a day, week or instantly for every notification).

I'm raising this topic here as it seems related, though the discussion could make more sense on the Spreed project perhaps, but as email issues there tend to get closed in favor of this one I thought this would be appropriate here. Let me know if there's a better place for discussing how I can help address this, or if you have further thoughts on the best fix.

[nickvergessen]

Well activities are not deleted, so basically your activity stream will contain all your chat messages a second time. doesn't sound highly useful and will also make a search on activity basically impossible in the future as there is too much data you wouldn't want to match.

"You have these new unseen notifications in the last day"

There is also nextcloud/server#3596 so something alike (maybe not on a daily basis, but more like weekly or something, could really be the solution to the problem at some point.

[jbarnoin]

Well activities are not deleted, so basically your activity stream will contain all your chat messages a second time. doesn't sound highly useful and will also make a search on activity basically impossible in the future as there is too much data you wouldn't want to match.

Alright, I hadn't realized Activities were supposed to be archived and searchable, the distinction between Activities and Notifications was unclear to me to be honest - it kind of appeared to me like two facets of the same concept.

I agree that the Upgrade notification issue should be solved by the same change.

Another thing I'd like your opinion on is settings for this feature. It'll certainly require at least a setting to enable emailing, but ideally individual settings to indicate which Notifications types should be emailed, and in which period, right? Creating a new page for Notification Settings feels kind of awkward though because Activities already have a settings page whose title is "Notifications", and to the user there might be no clear distinction why some of the settings would be on one page or the other, so they'd have to search both settings pages for any particular notification setting they're looking for. Could Activities and Notifications be put under a single common settings page somehow with 2 different sections? Or would that not be possible because they're separate apps?

[jbarnoin]

Alright, I've got a locally working version of this feature that is good enough for my own purposes, but would certainly require more work and checks for it to be ready for wide scale use. I've tested it for Talk messages and for Upgrade notifications, and it should work for others.

I have a working user settings page for Notifications to enable email sending, a setting for setting the email period similar to Activities, but no global admin settings or per-notification-type settings. A background job sends the mails and remembers the last unseen notification mailed to each user. The mails contain all the details and links of new notifications since the last one mailed.

@nickvergessen , I'm not sure what the usual policy is around here for contributions: is it ok for me to contribute a Pull Request soon to get early feedback even if I know it has some issues? Or should I not bother until I've spent more time on it to address some of the more obvious things and it's a more serious candidate for inclusion?
I know it would be good to have global admin settings to disable this, and ideally unit tests, for instance, and I haven't got to that part yet. Also not sure how to handle translations as I obviously can't do them all, I just set up for english and french. But I would still appreciate feedback on the direction it's going if that's acceptable.

[nickvergessen]

Just send a PR anytime and we will have a look.
We are past feature freeze for Nextcloud 21 anyway, so we have time to fix it as needed

[JJlVAP]

Hi @nickvergessen, we've never corresponded, nice to meet you! I noticed in a deck conversation yesterday that there seems to be some confusion or disagreement among the team about the purposes of activities vs notifications #2223 (nextcloud/deck#2223). As for the particulars of the issues I'm referencing, I don't have any strong opinion, and it may well be suitable for deck due date notifications to be ported or duplicated to activities. I would assume on first instinct though that they should remain notifications. Either way, it seems app developers are making these decisions not on the basis of the library's intended use cases, but by whether or not they offer email send functionality. If @jbarnoin were to submit a PR, I'd be happy to help with the job. Although I'll warn you that I'm a rusty dev reentering the field, and that my initial contributions may be suboptimal.

[jbarnoin]

Apologies, with work I haven't had the time to clean up my changes enough to submit the PR yet. I'll try and put something together in the next few days.

[JJlVAP]

Thanks for getting back, and for your work. No rush!

[lutalex]

I am also missing this feature hardly.
My case is notifying users that they were mentioned in comments in ONLYOFFICE document. Such notifications appear in notification center in a portal, but are not sent by email.

[nickvergessen]

Email reminders are coming with 23