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When does fixx send out email notifications ?
Hey i've set up an SMTP server and configured it in Fixx. The test email is sent with no problems. However i put myself as watch on a certain issue and edited it/resolved it. Of both actions i didnt recieve an email. So i tried logging in as another user and edited/unresolved it and commented on the issue. Of all actions i didn't get a notification.
Is there somethng i am doing wrong ?
Is there somethng i am doing wrong ?
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Hi Martijn,
The statement on the homepage means there are no auto-notifications in fixx unlike many popular bug tracking systems. You get notified when someone clicks a "Notify this user" box when amending an issue or if you choose to watch the issue.
fixx doesn't actually queue any of the mail. This must definitely be latency or connection problems between your SMTP server and just a general mail queue issue.
You receive notifications manually when someone chooses to notify you on the following actions,
- When an issue is created
- When an issue is re-assigned
You receive notifications when you watch an issue on the following actions,
- When a comment is added
- When an issue is modified
- When an issue is resolved
- When a user account is created
- When a password reset request is made
Also, to add to this, fixx doesn't send any notifications out if you were the person making the change. Nothing more annoying that the system notifying you about something you know you did. It will however, notify other watchers. Hence why you didn't get an e-mail when you modified an issue.
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Inappropriate?Ahh after a couple of minutes it did sent me an email saying a new comment had been posted. It also sent me an email of resolving the issue under a different user.
As the homepage states
Our email integration goes one better than traditional bug tracking systems, as it is geared towards preventing notification spam and is geared towards human interaction, leaving you in control.
Is this delay because it queue actions and sent them off with a delay so people only recieve 1 email ? So if a user resolves and 1 minute later unresolves the resolve action is pushed of the queue ?
I'd like to know more what the prevention of notification spam entails and which actions trigger an email. -
Inappropriate?Hi Martijn,
The statement on the homepage means there are no auto-notifications in fixx unlike many popular bug tracking systems. You get notified when someone clicks a "Notify this user" box when amending an issue or if you choose to watch the issue.
fixx doesn't actually queue any of the mail. This must definitely be latency or connection problems between your SMTP server and just a general mail queue issue.
You receive notifications manually when someone chooses to notify you on the following actions,
- When an issue is created
- When an issue is re-assigned
You receive notifications when you watch an issue on the following actions,
- When a comment is added
- When an issue is modified
- When an issue is resolved
- When a user account is created
- When a password reset request is made
Also, to add to this, fixx doesn't send any notifications out if you were the person making the change. Nothing more annoying that the system notifying you about something you know you did. It will however, notify other watchers. Hence why you didn't get an e-mail when you modified an issue.
I’m glad we are fighting spam.
The company says
this answers the question
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Inappropriate?Dear Sarat
I like the concepts behind the notification mechanisms you have, however I do find it a bit limiting that there is no way either through an RSS feed or an email to know that an external client has logged an issue.
Most external clients will place in minimal information about an issue and just presume that you are notified that they have raised an issue because it is in your system. Now there of course is work required on our part to educate our clients, however with regards to the case of issue creation, I really feel that is of benefit to have the functionality within fixx to allow new issue emails or RSS posts to be sent to the project lead, even if it is an option in fixx and off by default. It would most certainly benefit our workflow and i imagine others also. We are currently trailing fixx before purchasing it and this is one feature I do feel is lacking. Other than that, the system is excellent.
Regards
Owen
I’m frustrated at not having the option to modify my workflow
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Inappropriate?Thanks for the feedback Owen. I can understand where you are coming from and an RSS feed has certainly been something that has been discussed many a time. The problem with RSS as it stands is that it is a pretty insecure method of accessing your information as most RSS readers do not support authentication by default.
The email route certainly seems like the best option to be able to generate "pro-active" notifications to project leads. The original reason we didn't enforce automatic e-mails is obvious in my reply above but I know we are working on general notification improvements in 2.0
Perhaps the best medium would be to have a project option to "Notify assignees by default when an issue is created" and this pre-selects the "Notify Assignee" checkbox in Create new issue. This way, the user creating the issue has the ability to then choose NOT to notify the assignee if they want to prevent e-mail spam.
We will have a good think about this and see how we can implement it. I can already see an interesting design discussion around this at the Lab.
In either case, I hope this does not seriously impede your decision to purchase fixx. -
Inappropriate?I'd also love to see an email to all involved parties (assignee, project lead, issue submitter, anyone who commented). A bit like how getsatisfaction works if it wasnt for the emails i'd miss alot of good comments. Issue tracking is often critical and we rather get too much then too few emails, that might be us though.
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Inappropriate?This one is a bit more controversial from our point of view. I know personally that I mostly hate the default Get Satisfaction e-mails. Our team generally hates forced e-mails as most of us make it our business to check this site and also our fixx instances as they are intricate to our workflow.
Our general philosophy in terms of fixx was that the human processes surrounding it should ensure people are up to date with what is happening.
The "Watch issue" feature exists exactly for the reason you suggested and enables people to "subscribe" to changes to an issue. What it does not do is auto-subscribe you when you perform an action. Maybe we need more controls that enable you to watch an issue when you are performing common actions like commenting etc.
We will have a good think about it.
I’m worried about too much e-mail in my Inbox
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Inappropriate?True but this is often overlooked, which in turn is our (consumers) fault for not being educated enough i suppose. The need for automated emails stems more from a lack of overview in Fixx. I've posted several issues i have with the Dashboard that prevent me from using it as a place where i can f5 on to see what i missed.
- Dashboard shouldn't be grouped in my opinion but only sorted descending on date. The grouping often leads to overlooking changes in other projects and only seeing the last 5 changes per group has gotten me in trouble before (entirely my fault i know!).
- Dashboard doesn't show newly created issues (1.7)
I agree, i much rather force myself to go the fixx's index to see what's up. We can force ourselves to do so but our clients wont check back to see new comments regularly. A different set of rules should apply in my opinion for non users of fixx. They should get an email for every change in issues they've started or commented in.
Another note i want to raise is that while i think keeping the email messages to a bare minimum out of the box is a great thing however i do feel Fixx could greatly be improved with project based settings so we can enforce our own business rules when we see fit.
think:
- Notify all users of issue updates they're active in.
- Notify project lead (of everything)
- Global project watch.
Sometimes projects are that critical you need to act quickly, and as a developer i rather use my issue tracker as a means of communication in these cases. If i don't respond quickly testers,managers and clients will resort to different means of communication to get my attention and we all read enough joelonsoftware to know thats a bad thing :)
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This is brilliant stuff. I am certainly coming around to why more notifications can be better in certain circumstances. I think your point about clients is well made. More food for thought for us. -
Inappropriate?I like the idea of adding RSS-feeds; A possible workaround for authentication might be to use a session-id/token in the url of the RSS-feed. I don't think this will be less secure than sending authentication and/or session-id-headers; although it might be less convenient when the session 'expires', which will require the user to re-subscribe to a new feed).
(So; the user logs in. A unique url is generated for the RSS feed, which can be added his RSS-reader; This URL will stay valid for 2 weeks (for example), after which a new url will be generated).
On the other hand (authentication); if enough RSS-readers are available that -do- support authentication; It might be just a 'requirement' for this option to use ('if you want to use Fixx RSS feeds, you will need a RSS Reader that supports authentication, like ..., ..., ...')
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Our initial idea for RSS feeds involved generating "RSS keys" for users which are a unique hash generated randomly against their authentication details. This is what Basecamp and other web apps do to authenticate feeds. You then have the option of re-generating the key if it is made public. However, RSS is low on our priority right now because a lot of our consumers simply do not use RSS.
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Inappropriate?Ok, I just liked the idea of RSS as an alternative to e-mail notifications, as RSS messages might be less 'in-the-way' than mail-notifications.
Regarding the e-mail notifications; maybe it would be a nice feature to;
- Have per-project settings (don't/do send e-mail alerts for new issues)
- Be able to set a 'threshold' (per project) for e-mails (send e-mails for priority 'major' and higher')1 Comment Add a comment
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I agree that RSS is less intrusive but it just isn't popular enough to go in now. I'm sure we will be looking at it post 2.0.
The general notification system overhaul we have planned for 2.0 should address some of these ideas. -
Inappropriate?I was disappointed by Fixx's email facilities. I'm a single user freelance developer and so only have the one user - fixx administrator. When I assign an issue to myself the Email Notification checkbox disappears so I can't email myself when I create an issue.
Also when I add a comment or change an issue I'm watching - no emails. I've checked the settings in the Administration suite and sent a test email OK so I know it's not the settings.
For me the emails provide an essential part of my workflow, though I can understand that other might not want to see them. I think I could live with it if the Notification checkbox didn't vanish when I select myself as the assignee.
I’m sad
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Thanks for sharing your opinion David and we take your points on board. I am sorry that we did not deliver in the 1 bit of functionality that was critical to you but as you can appreciate, in a vast majority of use cases, notifying yourself when you make a change or assign things to yourself is not a desired feature.
This goes back to my core point above that one of the things fixx tries to solve (for a majority) is the pain of constant e-mail spam where every little change sends an e-mail.
It is however, obvious that a lot of our customers want the choice to control whether they get more or less e-mails and rest assured we are not ignoring this. We are looking to make wholesale notification improvements in fixx where an admin can control when and where notifications get sent. I think this means the system is flexible by default and does a lot of the things it does already, but you can turn it off if you want to. -
Will it be the admin that dictates it or will Users be able to turn certain messaging settings on/off ? The later sounds like it would please a broader audience.
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The idea behind our current concept is that an admin can set "global" settings and users can over-ride them for their personal preferences. The bottom line is that most organisations will want a "default" setting.
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perfect :)
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