Unless you are checking out Redmine on a regular basis—that is, once a day or even more frequently—it's easy to miss some important information, such as a new issue that was assigned to you, new data on an issue, changes in Wiki documentation, a new reply in a forum topic, and so on. Unfortunately, not all of such data can be found on a single page (say My page), and such pages can contain too much information to examine (for example, the Activity tab of the project). Therefore, in this section, we will discuss how to make sure that you will be notified about changes that are made to the objects you are interested in.
Personally, I find it convenient to be notified via email, as you get these kinds of notifications when you are ready for them (that is, you check for new messages and expect them to come). Users usually check their mailboxes once a day or even more often. There are many different tools that can help users get their emails in time. In email clients, it is commonly possible to control which email messages you receive (using filters). These are only some of the benefits of email notifications. The only problem with them is that they must be configured properly to be effective—a too narrow configuration can prevent important information from being sent and a too wide configuration can make you lose interest in reading every notification message.
So, let's discuss how to configure email notifications. Click on the My account link in the top-right menu. This will open the account page. Find the Email notifications box, which looks as follows:
Let's review all the available notification options:
- For any event on all my projects: This option is selected by default. If you choose it, you will get all the notifications for all the events (for example, for changes in Wiki pages, replies on forums, comments in issues, and so on) on all projects that you are a member of. Practice shows that it's really too much! So, you will likely not want to leave this option selected.
- For any event on the selected projects only...: When you choose this option, the list of your projects will appear below the drop-down list. In that list, you will be able to select for which projects you want to receive notifications for all events. So, this is a kind of limited previous notification option. For other projects—that is, ones that are not selected—Redmine will use the following notification option:
- Only for things I watch or I'm involved in: If you choose this option, you will be notified about events in objects that you watch, or created, that are assigned to you, or were assigned to you. This is perhaps the best choice. But if you choose it, do not forget to watch objects that you are interested in but which were not created by you and are not/were not assigned to you.
- Only for things I am assigned to: If you select this option, you'll be notified about events on objects that you watch or that are assigned to you. In Redmine, only issues can be assigned to users. So, this means that only notifications that are related to issues will be sent to you (except, of course, notifications related to watched objects).
- Only for things I am the owner of: If you select this option, you'll be notified about events only on those objects that you watch or created.
- No events: This option disables notifications completely (including notifications related to any watched objects, what actually makes watching useless).
Tip
No notifications even when you enabled them?
Ask your Redmine administrators whether they configured email delivery for Redmine. Refer to Chapter 3, Configuring Redmine, for more details.
If, for example, you are watching an issue and add a comment to it, then by default you will get a notification that you have added that comment. This behavior can be disabled by checking the I don't want to be notified of changes that I make myself checkbox, which is unchecked by default. I believe that this is one of the first options that should be changed in your account right after registration.
Tip
Still no (or only some) notifications come?
For example, you are getting notifications for watched issues but not for watched topics. Most likely, this means that your Redmine administrators disabled the Message added action under the Email notifications tab on the Settings page, which can be found in the Administration menu. So, you need to ask them to check whether the appropriate actions are enabled.
In Redmine, the best way to ensure that you'll be notified about changes that are made to an object is to watch it. Watching an object is easy—just click on the Watch link in its contextual menu (which can be usually found in the top-right corner of its content area), as shown in the following screenshot:
After this, or if you are already watching the object, the title of the corresponding link turns to Unwatch and the star icon becomes yellow, like this:
The Only for things I watch or I'm involved in option for email notifications (which was discussed in The email notifications subsection earlier) is quite satisfactory, but what if you want to be notified about new issues? Yes, you can watch issues, but not new ones. Should you switch to the For any event on all my projects option in this case? No. Luckily, there is one more way to get such updates—news feeds.
If an object or a list has an Atom link similar to the one shown in the preceding screenshot, this means that you can subscribe to that object or list using a news feeds aggregator, such as iTunes or Safari. If this link is available, it can usually be found in the bottom-right corner of the page.
Atom is an XML-based language for web feeds. To be able to read them you need a special application called a reader or aggregator. The Atom link points to such a web feed.