Inbox and notifications

#Inbox

The Inbox collects:

• mentions,
• comments that concern you (see below) and replies in text comments you took part in,
• date reminders,
• comments and records from guests via share links,
• pages and workspaces shared with you,
• changes on pages you follow (you follow your own pages when creating them; the bell at the top right toggles following, on a phone Follow in the ⋯ menu),
• messages from automations.

#Who hears about comments

A new comment – on a page, on a database record or as a new text comment – does not notify the whole workspace, only:

• who follows the page (whoever creates a page follows it automatically; for a record: who follows the database),
• the page's owner,
• for a record: who created it and the people in its person properties (such as Assignee),
• who already commented on the same page or record,
• who is mentioned in the comment with @ – in page and record comments by full name or e-mail address (@Anna Berg). Someone mentioned who would be notified anyway gets a single notification, the mention.

Replies in a text comment reach everyone who has written in that thread and the people mentioned in it. The author and anyone who may not see the page or the record are never notified. To keep up with a page, follow it with the bell.

By default what concerns you directly – mentions, shared pages, comments, reminders – arrives in the inbox, as push, by e-mail and in connected chat apps. Guest comments come without e-mail and chat app. Changes on pages you follow and automations only land in the inbox, so that not every small edit triggers a notification or mail. Under Settings → Notifications this can be changed per kind and channel; Reset to defaults restores the initial state.

Retention: read notifications are deleted after 90 days, unread ones after a year; at most the newest 1,000 per person are kept. The inbox shows the newest 100.

For administrators: security incidents of the instance. Admins see their own row Security incidents of the instance among the notification kinds: what the detection rules find on the whole instance (password guessing, new admin rights, probing …). Each admin chooses how incidents arrive – inbox, push, e-mail and chat apps are on by default – and which: All incidents (default) or Critical only. The choice applies to every channel of this kind; every incident still shows under Administration → Threats & incidents. Clicking or tapping the notification opens the incident's page. The row Security notices is only about your own account (a new sign-in, a wrong journal PIN, a chat app switched off); whoever had switched channels off there before the update has them off for security incidents too. Other people don't see the row.

Unread items are marked and can be filtered. A click opens the spot, for text comments the thread directly. Notifications without a page lead to their place in the app: a security incident to its page under Administration → Threats & incidents, a new sign-in to the signed-in devices, a chat app switched off to its connections – also when tapping the push notification and through the link in e-mails and chat apps.

#Notifications from workflows

Workflows use two kinds of their own that you can switch off per channel under Settings → Notifications: Messages from workflows (what a workflow sends) and Errors, pauses and approvals of workflows – so you never miss an approval when you mute the messages. An approval notification opens the workflow page on the Approvals tab.

#E-mail

If a mail server is set up on the instance, unread notifications arrive by e-mail as a digest after ten minutes – one mail for everything that has piled up, each notification at most once. Under Settings → Notifications, the E-mail column can be switched on and off per kind. Invitations to a workspace and pages shared with you arrive by e-mail right away.

#Weekly digest

Under Settings → Notifications → Weekly digest you subscribe to an e-mail that arrives every Monday at 7 am in your time zone (your browser's time zone is saved when you switch it on):

• Changed in pages you follow – with the workspace and who changed it (changes of the last seven days, by others only),
• Overdue tasks and Open tasks – as in My tasks, across all workspaces.

With a short AI summary of the changes (only shown when AI is on for you) puts a few bullet points before the list. The AI only reads pages it may read for you, with your AI provider. If AI is off or the request fails, the e-mail comes as a plain list. If there is nothing to report in a week, no e-mail is sent. The digest needs a mail server to be set up.

#Push notifications

Under Settings → Notifications:

Push notifications open the page concerned. No document content appears on the lock screen.

Signing out, the end of a session or a locked account end the push subscription; enable it again after the next sign-in if needed.

In the apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, notifications come through the app: it asks for permission after the first sign-in, and the number of unread ones shows on the app icon. Notification kinds apply there as well. These notifications are end-to-end encrypted and therefore show their text – the relay, Apple and Google cannot read it, see Push relay.

#Test notification

Settings → Notifications → Send test notification immediately sends a notification "Test notification – everything works." to all your push targets: every browser with push enabled and every app with notifications allowed. It takes the same way as every notification – Web Push, the push relay or Expo – but leaves nothing in the inbox. Tapping it opens these settings.

After at most ten seconds, each device is listed with the channel it went through (Relay · end-to-end encrypted, Expo or Web Push) and what happened:

• Delivered – handed to Apple, Google or the browser's push service. If nothing shows up anyway, check the device: are notifications allowed for Flowplan? An active Focus is mentioned.
• Registration expired – open the app once, it registers again. For a browser whose subscription expired, enable push there again.
• Notifications turned off – allow them in the app or in the device's system settings.
• Push relay not set up, unreachable or instance not verified – this concerns the instance, not your device; the message gives the reason (e.g. PUSH_RELAY=off, APP_URL without HTTPS, /.well-known/flowplan-push not reachable). See Configuration.
• No devices registered – enable push above or open the app and allow notifications.

The test only goes to your own devices, regardless of Notification kinds and Focus filters – the device's own permission and Focus still apply. At most five tests in ten minutes. The result never shows tokens or keys; administrators also see a diagnostics line with the relay address, whether /.well-known/flowplan-push is enabled and the instance's address (APP_URL).

#Chat apps

Instead of (or besides) push and e-mail, notifications arrive right away in a chat app: Telegram, Gotify, ntfy or Matrix. Under Settings → Notifications → Chat apps you connect one target per service; which kinds arrive there you choose in the Notification kinds card, column Chat apps. By default these are mentions, shared pages, comments, reminders and security notices – not guest comments, changes on pages you follow or automations. What is switched off for the inbox does not reach the chat app either.

Send test message sends a message right away and shows the outcome: delivered, Credentials refused (HTTP 401), Not found (HTTP 404) (address, topic, room or chat ID), Server not reachable or Internal addresses are blocked. Change takes new details; an empty token field keeps the stored token. Disconnect deletes the connection with its credentials.

What a message says: as with push, the kind, a short excerpt of the notification and a link to the place. With Include the text off, only “New notification in Flowplan” with the link. Notifications from end-to-end encrypted spaces always arrive without content. Tokens or other secrets are never part of a message.

Credentials (bot, app and access tokens, passwords) are stored only encrypted, like other stored secrets, and never shown again – only “Token set (…abcd)”. Connecting and disconnecting appear under Settings → Security check → Sign-ins & changes.

Delivery: messages go through a queue like push and e-mail. If the service does not answer, Flowplan retries with growing pauses and gives up after six attempts; if the service throttles (HTTP 429), Flowplan waits as long as asked. At most 20 messages a minute go to one target. What you already read in the app is not sent any more. If the service refuses a target three times in a row (401/403/404 or a blocked internal address), Flowplan switches it off and tells you in the inbox; Switch on again resumes it once fixed.

For administrators: the switch Operations alerts sends failed backups, full storage, errors of background workers and many failed sign-ins (at most once a day per alert) to your chat apps – also without a webhook under Monitoring. Security incidents arrive through the row Security incidents of the instance of the notification kinds, not twice.

Which services and servers are allowed is up to the administration (Administration → Chat apps).