Notifications and the inbox
Radd tells you about work through notifications: a row in your inbox, and sometimes an email. This page covers what triggers one, watchers, the inbox, and the channel matrix that controls both.
Three things cause a notification, and Radd never notifies you about your own action:
- Someone assigns a work item to you.
-
Someone mentions you, by typing
@and your name in a description or a comment. - You watch something, and it changes — a state change or a comment on a work item, or an edit to a page.
Four more events raise their own notification too:
- An approval request, or a decision on one.
- An SLA breach, or a due-soon warning.
- A notify-user step in an automation rule.
- Being added to a work item as a participant.
See the table below for the full list.
A work item's state change or comment reaches only its watchers — Radd never tells someone who has not asked to hear about it. A notification only ever reaches someone who can still read the work item. A permission change after the fact silently drops it, rather than deliver something you can no longer open.
Watching a work item or a page means Radd notifies you about its ambient activity too, not only about being assigned or mentioned. On a work item that means a state change or a comment; on a page, an edit.
Radd automatically starts watching a work item for you:
- The moment you create it.
- The moment someone assigns it to you.
- The moment you become its reporter.
- The moment you comment on it.
- The moment someone adds you to it as a participant.
Radd deliberately leaves approvers out of this list: an approver's part ends with their vote. Joining a team that already holds a work item does not start watching it for you either, because team membership is ambient and changes as the team does.
Click Watching on a work item's header to start or stop watching it by hand. The button shows how many people watch it, and their names in its tooltip. Click the bell icon on a page to do the same there — see The wiki, which also covers that editing a page watches it for you.
Open Inbox from the sidebar for the full list, newest first. Check Unread only to hide everything you have already read.
Click the bell in the top bar for the same list as a drawer, without leaving the page you are on. See The application window for how the drawer opens and closes.
Click a row to mark it read. If it names a work item, Radd also opens that work item — the full page navigates to it, and the drawer opens its peek in place instead. A notification about a page marks read the same way, but does not yet take you to the page.
TODO(verify): confirm with the product owner whether a page-update notification is meant to link to the page — right now clicking one only marks it read.
Clicking a row marks it read. Click Mark all read to clear everything at once instead. Radd has no control to mark a read notification unread again today.
Open Settings → Profile and scroll to Notifications to set, per event, whether it reaches your inbox and whether it also emails you the moment it happens. Turning off a row's inbox box also turns off its email box — a muted event never becomes a notification, so there is nothing to mail.
| Event | In your inbox by default | Emailed the moment it happens, by default |
|---|---|---|
| Assigned to me | Yes | Yes |
| Mentions | Yes | Yes |
| Added as a participant | Yes | Yes* |
| Comments on watched issues | Yes | Yes |
| Approval requests & decisions | Yes | Yes |
| State changes on watched issues | Yes | No |
| SLA breaches | Yes | No |
| SLA due-soon warnings | Yes | No |
| Automation rules | Yes | No |
| Changes to pages I watch | Yes | No |
Every event reaches your inbox unless you turn it off; Radd mutes nothing until you say so. An event marked "No" for email still reaches you — in the digest described below, not the moment it happens.
* An account with no saved notification preferences gets this one emailed by default, the same as the rest of the column. An account that saved its preferences before Radd added this event does not — the saved row is yours to change, and Radd will not add a channel to it that you never asked for. Tick the box yourself to turn it on.
Radd sends email through two channels, and a row is only ever sent once. Whichever channel takes it first stamps it, so the other leaves it alone.
Radd emails five personally-directed events individually, usually within seconds: assigned, mentioned, commented, approval, and added as a participant, by default. It only sends one while the row is still unread by the time it gets to it.
Everything else you have not muted arrives in a digest: one email batching your unread notifications, roughly every five minutes. When the digest runs, Radd drops a notification older than 24 hours from the mail, though not from your inbox. This way, a long silence does not flood you with mail once the server catches up. Turn the digest off from the same Notifications panel; muting individual events is usually the better tool.
Radd sends no email at all when your administrator has not configured an outgoing mail server.
The server never emails a service account — an account created for an API key, with no person behind it. A service account cannot sign in, so nothing in the interface ever shows its inbox; Radd still writes the rows, in case something reads them through the API.
Radd also carries an internal identity, the system actor, that it credits with automated writes — a mail-intake reply, a webhook sweep. Nobody watches the system actor, it gets no inbox rows, and Radd never emails it; nobody reads its inbox, so there is nothing to tell it.
Mirrored from project.radd-hq.com on 2026-09-12. Documentation is written there; this copy is regenerated by scripts/publish_wiki.py and hand edits do not survive it.