The custom notification feature in the Better Content Archiving app gives you much more control over notifications in the following way. 

You can define a so-called notification scheme that can contain one or more notifications and can be applied to any space. A notification is defined by:

1. a schedule (CRON expression)
2. a CQL query that collects the pages/blogposts to include in the notification
3. an email template (custom subject and body)
4. recipients (any combination of last modifier, author, owners, space admins, specific users and specific groups)

Because all these are fully customizable, it solves many of use cases mentioned in previous comments.

When a user edits a page, Confluence should not by default add that user as a watcher. That just makes this notification problem work. Maybe they want that, but often they don't. And there's no checkbox to opt-out at page-save time.

(This is how Data Center works anyway; I know this suggestion is for Cloud, but I don't have such an instance to test this on).

This is a daily problem for me and the team I work in.

Our test case pages are very very long.  Each row in the table is a test case. 

Any change to the page issues an email that is over 2MB is size, irrespective of the number of changes. The email takes ages to fully load, and then begins the hunt to find the green-shaded content that has changed. During page load in the email, Outlook hangs.

Addressing this will help:

• Improve application of time and focus/attention - only see rows where content has changed.  (If I want to see the whole page, I'll go to Confluence)
• Reduce impact on Outlook and its usability
• Support adoption of Confluence by removing obstacles

Many thanks, Daniel Ayele! I'm looking forward to this feature

Notifications spamming their mailbox will probably make Confluence adoption extremely difficult with my users and clients.

Just to add another voice on this, I'm in the middle of trying to drive departmental adoption of Confluence, and the #1 point of feedback I've heard from users is that notifications are blowing up their inbox. I can help them on a 1:1 basis and provide articles on how to self-resolve the issue (either by changing Confluence settings or setting Outlook rules), but I can't guarantee that everyone who has the problem is going to raise the topic or search for it, and those silent users are going to become resentful.

As an admin, I would expect to be able to set the defaults for communication levels, and then allow users to opt themselves in further, not to have to claw their way out from under a ton of unwanted messages.

David not sure how sustainable of a solution it is for you - but the way I've worked around it (as you can see I'm a lonely voice in this request) is to set page restrictions so only you can view/edit the page before deleting the comment. Even though it's a completely inefficient process - it will at least keep the notifications from going out.

We have interest in this from a perspective of deleting inappropriate comments. It would be sufficient for our use case if we could turn off notiication's when deleting comments. I haven't any good Marketplace options for this either.

This continues to be problematic for me/my users. Confluence is known as "spammy" around the office, even with all e-mail settings changed and individuals unchecking the 'notify watchers box'.
I reiterate my previous comment - if the vision of Confluence is to help reduce inbox traffic, the inability to control notifications for more than just page edits needs to be addressed...Please!!

Not sure Atlassian realizes how incredibly important this is to solve - both for attachments and comments.

This is hugely inhibitory to adoption, as new/timid users are afraid of generating notification storms, and hate getting them even more than that. This topic directly relates to a successful implementation of Confluence, no matter how big the company.

One of your key selling points for Confluence is to get out of e-mail....instead our users are just getting a new weight on their inboxes. Such a fundamental contradiction needs to be addressed! Give us the ability to check/uncheck notify watchers for all edits!

+1

The biggest gripe amongst my user base is the "email hell". In particular, being notified multiple times every time someone presses save. This really needs to be addresses. The editor should be able to have more control about whether to generate notification events when they're making changes, and the recipients should be able to "stop" getting notified about particular types of event for particular pages/spaces. There's so many notifications at the moment that the important ones get overlooked.

Mark.

Definitely in favor of this. For our users, the vast majority of attachments are added through the page editor. Adding 4 attachments through the page editor in a 5 minute session shouldn't generate 5 emails (1 for the page itself + 1 for each attachment).

Also, should be able to choose no emails for notifications ((in various "categories" as others have suggested.

Why this insistence on using the old technology of email. As a Wiki convert, I just monitor the notifications on my Wiki. Why do I need to get emails at all?

Vote for this "bug fix"

It is possible to disable the default "Notify watchers" check mark:
http://www.k15t.com/display/SUPPORT/Deactivate+Notify+Watchers+by+Default

But this is just a workaround. WebDAV seems to ignore this and every time someone is editing or uploading via WebDAV, we send an email blast to our customers, who are annoyed and have created filter rules for our (sometimes really important) emails. Right now, we did not find a way to fix this problem. It would be really convenient if Confluence would provide an "official" way to manage the emails that are send by the system.

PIcture perfect example. I just received 6 emails in my inbox on this. And for your other poor souls who have voted on and are watching this issue, it'll now be 7. The other day I received 40 emails because one of our users was checking boxes on and off in the

macro. Seriously. An email EVERY SINGLE TIME A BOX WAS CHECKED OR UNCHECKED. This is absolute madness.

@spammers above
Will you please start just voting FOR this, and stop writing commets like "+1 to above", or correct some unimportant typing mistake. My inbox is running full of notifications!

@Pierre Hilson
And your edited comment above send 2 e-mails to everyone - oh, now 3
This farce has to end soon!

+1 to all the comments above.
We do love Confluence but all people got to hate the numerous uncontrolled notifications received.
Worst is when you update an article and add a few screenshot. For each screenshot added (and I may put 20 screenshots in an How-To article), people get an email.
This mean 400 people in my case getting a useless mail at each screenshot added.

At least, the notification should be sent only when the page is saved and not when the attachement is added.
Note: During the initial edition of a page, notifications are not sent for each attachement added. This happen only when updating a page.

Please consider this as a bug.

@Ole Kristensen guided me here so that I may explain the comment repeated by Ole above.

I use email rule to guide mails from the wiki to a specific "Wiki" folder in my mail client (Lotus Notes). There are two reasons for this:

• I avoid getting the wiki emails onto my mobile device, as the rule will catch them before the get that far. And on a mobile device without access to the corporate wiki, these mails are definitely spam!
• I can read through wiki notifications when it fits into my routines. Usually it will be once a day. And when I do so, I will sort the emails by title. In that way the inconvenience of having multiple notifications because someone corrects minor errors or adds many attachments is less, compared to the situation when the wiki emails are scattered around in my inbox.

And honestly, had I known that correcting a simple typing mistake would generate eight (8) emails, I would have left the error there.
One strange thing, I think, is that mentioning myself will not generate an email to me. (so much for the chance of generating a lot of Seasons Greetings to yourself, in the event you don't have any friends

Posting from today in our corporate wiki:

"Johannes Dissing:
Email notifications! I'm glad I have made an email rule to direct all Wiki stuff directly to a folder! I might get spammed with mentions by Mia Louise Rydahl Due, Ole Kristensen, Line Wilgaard Wittrup, or even myself Johannes Dissing" - that one created 4 emails and his correction of 2 typos 8 more emails. + several emails to the Watchers too. This is considered SPAM and should be corrected!

+1 I support @Tom's comment!

I am amazed that this matter hasn't gained traction.

As far as I am concerned, the reason the Confluence community isn't rallying around this issue is because the people who converse via the JIRA/Confluence platform aren't the same people who actually use Confluence within your customers' organizations. The latter are greatly annoyed by the results of the lack of control, whereas the former don't use the systems and don't get the blizzard of notifications. In that case, it is up to Atlassian to make a decision to the significant benefit of the users and whether or not administrators can empathize with their users. I believe it is time for Atlassian to implement this very useful improvement even if it means delaying for a bit some fancy new bells and whistles.

Tom

Auto-generated or uninteresting attachment change notifications are the most irritating for us.

The ability to filter such changes at the global, space or user profile level would be useful. See comment on CONF-7612.

We need a possibility to create pages in a kind of "draft" state to prevent mail notification is sent after creation. While draft state all changes will be made as [x] minor change. When the page is "ready" the last change will be made as major change, which will notify the proples.

I'd like to also see more control over what gets sent in a notification. Now, under Settings, a user can specify whether he wants to see the change called out, or the entire page, or both. I need a third setting that only shows the name of the page and the name of the person who made the edit.

In the USA, we have strict laws about publicly exposing "health information." Using Confluence in any healthcare-oriented endeavor runs the risk that someone will make a change to a page containing protected health information, and the changed content will get sent out in unprotected emails to X number of watching users. That's a Bad Thing.

Similar fiature request may be found in CONF-7612. I hope that this improvement will be implement in short-range time.

Cheers,

Ivan

Any progress on this issue? Would be really nice to have more control over how and what Confluence sends email alerts out for.

Cheers,
Luke.