Watching items and notification digests¶

Watching an item means asking to be told when it changes — the same idea as watching a Jira ticket or a GitHub repository. Any user can watch a deal, company, contact, tender, survey, document or news post, and can also add colleagues as watchers of an item.

Watchers get an in-app notification when a watched item changes, and an email digest of the notifications they didn't open.

Watching is per user, per item, per tenant. It carries no permissions: being a watcher tells you an item changed, it does not grant access you didn't already have.

How it behaves¶

Starting and stopping¶

The watch icon on an item toggles your own watch. The watcher list on the same panel adds or removes other people. Watches survive edits to the item and are kept (but ignored) while a user account is inactive, so reactivating an account restores that person's watchlist intact.

Your watchlist — reached from your profile menu, top right, rather than the left navigation, because it is personal to you — lists everything you watch, with each item's name, and a count of activity you haven't opened yet. Items whose underlying record has since been deleted are returned with exists: false, so the list can offer to clear them rather than showing a dead entry.

What raises a notification¶

Notifications come from an aspect bound to service methods carrying a watchAction annotation, so they fire on the business action itself rather than on a screen. The events are:

Event	Raised when	Applies to
`dealStatusChanged`	A deal's status is set	Deals
`dealUpdated`	A deal is saved	Deals
`signoffRequested`	A signoff is created	Deals
`signoffConfirmed`	A signer confirms	Deals
`signoffRejected`	A signer rejects	Deals
`figuresSubmitted`	Turnover is submitted	Deals
`figuresImported`	Figures are imported	Deals
`companyUpdated`	Company details are saved	Companies
`documentUploaded`	A document is added or updated	Deals, companies
`contactUpdated`	A person's details are saved	Contacts
`tenderCompleted`	A supplier marks their submission complete	Tenders
`surveySubmitted`	A respondent submits their answers	Surveys

Two rules apply to every event:

You are never notified of your own action. The user who triggered the change is skipped, even though they are still a watcher.
The same event on the same item is suppressed for 10 minutes per watcher. Bulk edits, imports and repeated saves raise the same event many times; the throttle collapses them into one notification.

Delivery: in-app first, email second¶

Every event writes one row to the notification table. That row is both the in-app notification behind the bell icon and the queue entry for the email digest — there is no separate email queue.

The digest emails only notifications you have not opened. A notification is eligible once it is 15 minutes old (so somebody working in the app sees it there first and is never emailed about it) and stops being eligible after 7 days. Once a notification has been considered for email, it is latched and never reconsidered.

Because the digest sweeps the notification table rather than a watching-specific queue, it also covers notifications from chat, comment subscriptions, survey invitations and validation requests. Workflow task reminders are excluded — those have their own reminder emails (see workflow tasks).

Settings a user controls¶

Digest on or off: the Alert me to unread system notifications checkbox on your own settings screen (contact.notificationEmail). This is the master per-user switch — with it unticked you get in-app notifications only and no digest email, whatever else is set.
Digest cadence: off, hourly, or daily at a chosen hour. Defaults to daily at 08:00.
Per event: whether it raises an in-app notification, and whether it can appear in the email digest. Both default on, so the flags are opt-outs.

Settings a tenant controls¶

On Settings > General > Notifications:

Summary emails (notifications.digestEnabled) — the master switch for digest emails. Defaults to off: until a tenant turns it on, watching produces in-app notifications only and no email is ever sent.

Why does it change unexpectedly¶

You stopped getting emails about an item you still watch. The digest only includes notifications you have not opened. If you read it under the bell icon before the digest ran, it is deliberately left out.
A busy day produced one notification, not ten. The same event on the same item is throttled to one per watcher per 10 minutes.
You were added as a watcher by someone else. The watcher panel lets other users add you.
Nothing arrives by email at all. Check notifications.digestEnabled for the tenant first — it is off by default — then the user's Alert me to unread system notifications checkbox, then their digest cadence. All four gates (tenant, user checkbox, cadence, per-event) must pass.
A digest arrived late, or covering an odd window. Digests are dispatched by the task scheduler. The notificationDigest job runs every minute and decides per user whether their hourly or daily digest is due, so a scheduler outage delays digests rather than dropping them.
Notifications stopped for one user. Inactive contacts are excluded from delivery while keeping their watching rows.

What it is not¶

Not the activity feed or audit log — that is a permanent record of what happened, visible to anyone with access; watching is a personal subscription that pushes to you.
Not workflow tasks — a task is work assigned to you that you must complete; a watch notification is information, with nothing to action.
Not comment subscriptions — those follow a single comment thread and email each reply individually, and you join one automatically by commenting or by being @mentioned. Watching follows the whole item, is always turned on deliberately, and deliberately raises no event for comments: comment notification is subscriptions' job, and duplicating it told the same person about one comment three times. Commenting does not start you watching.
Not the daily news digest — that is a separate opt-in (Send digest on the contact record) covering published news, not item activity.
Not a permission. Watching an item never grants access to it.