Request: Supported API access to the GitHub notifications inbox

[joshka]

Problem

GitHub’s notification inbox is an important workflow for maintainers who work across many repositories. At that scale, the web interface can be difficult to triage efficiently, and third-party tools cannot provide a complete alternative because the public APIs expose only part of the inbox functionality.

The REST Notifications API is useful, but it does not provide parity with the notification inbox. In particular:

• It supports only personal access tokens (classic), not GitHub Apps or fine-grained personal access tokens.
• Its filtering capabilities are considerably more limited than those available in the web interface.
• Some inbox state and operations, including saved notifications and filtering by Done state, are unavailable or incomplete.
• The GraphQL API does not publicly expose the notification inbox.

This makes it difficult to build secure notification clients, maintainer dashboards, or personal automation without relying on classic tokens, inefficient polling, and many additional API requests.

Requested outcome

Could GitHub provide a supported API for the notification inbox, either through GraphQL or by expanding the REST API?

Ideally, it would support:

• Listing notification threads with the same state represented by the web inbox.
• Filtering by repository, organization, reason, type, read state, Done state, and saved state.
• Marking notifications as read, unread, Done, saved, or unsubscribed.
• GitHub App user access tokens and fine-grained personal access tokens.
• Efficient pagination or incremental synchronization suitable for notification clients.

GraphQL seems particularly well suited to this because clients could retrieve a notification together with its subject, subscription state, and relevant issue or pull-request fields in one request.

Use case

As an open-source maintainer, I receive notifications across many repositories. I would like to use or build tools that prioritize direct mentions and review requests, group routine automation, and archive completed work while keeping the GitHub inbox as the source of truth.

This is difficult with the current API—not because notifications are entirely inaccessible, but because the public API does not expose enough of the inbox model to reproduce an effective triage workflow.

Request for direction

If broader notification API support is planned, could GitHub share its current direction or identify the appropriate roadmap item? If it is not planned, a clear statement would still help developers avoid designing integrations around functionality that is unlikely to become public.

Related discussion: Notifications GraphQL API

[github-actions[bot]]

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