Comment by toast76 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast76 | Hacker News Reader

Amusingly, we (BugHerd) have exactly this sort of system in place. Almost universally our users prefer to get individual messages. For a lot of these notification emails, just the subject line is enough for most people to know whether an action is required or not. Grouping the notifications means you _must_ open to the email to see what's going on = more work.

Possibly the biggest complaint is that if you're collaborating on a project, you never quite know when someone knows what you want them to know...meaning you have to pick up the phone to notify them yourself.

We're removing the feature and defaulting to instant notifications. We'll also offer the users the ability to skip instant notifications in favour of weekly, daily or twice daily summaries depending on what is appropriate for their role in the project.

It also greatly depends on the context. Something like BugHerd (we use and love BugHerd btw!) I definitely want individual notifications for my errors, because as you already mentioned, looking at just the subject lets me know its priority.

However, for something else that is less important, and likely more noisy, aggregated notifications are ideal.

On our platform, our big feature is forms with routing and approvals. When a form is generated and sent to the organization's users, whoever is assigned to approve the forms would be inundated with submissions if they were not aggregated. They're not time sensitive, so acting upon each submission as they happen is never a concern.

Interesting. I think ultimately user control is what you want here. For example, Trello offers a choice between Instant, Hourly, and Never.

For now Meldium uses a heuristic to batch so if only one event occurs then you still get the subject line brevity that you mention.

My similar implementation offers these emailing options (every, digest or none). The nice thing about this approach is you can just add logic in the post_commit handler to route the notifications appropriately (instant email, digest queue or /dev/null appropriately based on user preferences)

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