Configuring triggers for notifications would be a great feature.

We also require disabling all notifications for certain spaces since some information security restrictions forbit transferring information to email-servers. A notification "something changed" would be allowed and useful though...

We are evidently delighted if this feature is enabled. Confluence trigger emails to users sometimes repetitive. 

Scenario: Same user watching page, mentioned with @.

If we enable more granularity on mail trigger configuration this would be avoided by setting the globally trigger mail like 5 mins approach. Or Jira digest approach. 

We understand it based on the user's different notification mail setting, it's still confusing when users get multiple emails for single action. Ideally, this would be avoided by digest kind of feature implementation.

Thank you
Gobinath 

It would also be nice to be able to turn off batching all together. The ability to turn off various types of notifications at the global level would also be useful as the existence of some notifications is a problem for us.

I strongly agree with 5 minutes timer approach.
If user continues to edit the same page within 5 minutes,
it should revoke previous email notification from the queue.

After 5 minutes after editing, it should start compare from the beginning of the edit including change set of revoked notification.

For example, somewhat like this.

9:00am Starts editing (Bookmark here and Start timer)
9:01am Edit content and Save (Reset the Timer to 5 min)
9:02am Delete attachment 1 (Reset the Timer to 5min)
9:06am Add more content and attachment (Reset the Timer to 5 min)
9:11am Timed-out 5min :
Now, Starts building change set notification between 9:00 am and 9:11am.

It should be only one email notification that includes edited contents, deleted attachment and added attachments.

Also, it would be nice if we can adjust this timer between 1 min to hours.

Also, it would be great if we still have "Notify Now" button or menu within "Sharing" menu.

Thank you.

CJ.

I was communicating with John Masson on this. Here is the content of an email I sent to him which describes the problem in detail:

Basically the whole issue is that it's "All or Nothing" when it comes to watching confluence spaces. By default, members of my team are set to watch our space. When we import Word documents, that plugin creates many attachments and stuff. A notification is sent for each attachment created (and probably for each modification and deletion of attachments as well, although I have not tested this).

Also when people are adding, moving, deleting pages, those are setup to each send a notification as well. In an hour's worth of time I got hundreds of individual email notifications from confluence for these "tiny" operations.

As part of the settings for a space, there needs to be a way to configure which events send email notifications. This will allow people to watch a space while at the same time only getting "important" updates.

Slightly related to this is the "Notify Watchers" checkbox when modifying a page. This is always checked by default. I was looking online to see if there was a setting to make this unchecked by default, but to my surprise there wasn't. So I had to modify the "head" script in admin settings for confluence to use javascript to uncheck the box. This is really bad from a usability perspective, although it does solve the problem.

So in short, having "on/off" options for each individual event that Confluence sends an email for at the Space admin level or (even better) at the profile level, will be amazing. Perhaps the space settings could define defaults for users, but they could fine-tune those default settings in their profile for a personalized experience.

Another approach that would be great is a digest or batch emailing. Instead of adding complex configurations for each of these events, keep them as they are but take one of the following approaches:

1. Have a "batch email" expiration timer. For example, wait 5 minutes for events to stop. If any events occur that send email within that 5 minute timer, reset the timer back to 5 minutes and add that email to a batch queue. When the 5 minutes expires and there has been total "silence", send a single email to all watchers of the space with a nicely formatted list of all the events captured. This 5 minute timer would be configurable (could be 30 seconds or 2 hours).
2. Leverage the daily digest option currently available in user profiles. If a user has this checked, all events (currently it only works on page modifications) will be added to the digest instead of sent as an individual email.

Hope these ideas help you. Any of these ideas work for me, and will help greatly reduce the amount of "spam" we're getting.