Notifications
Everything lands in the in-app inbox. Email, a phone banner and Telegram are optional deliveries of the same events, not separate feeds.
That is the design worth knowing: nothing is ever delivery-only. Turning every channel off never means missing something — it means you have to look.
What produces one
Section titled “What produces one”| Kind | When | Counts as “important” |
|---|---|---|
| Assigned | Somebody assigns a task to you | yes |
| Mention | Your handle appears in a comment, a task description or a page | yes |
| Comment | On a task you are assigned to, following, or created | no |
| Comment | On a page you wrote, or one you have already commented on | no |
| Due soon | A task you are on is due within two days, or is already past due | yes |
| Invite | You were invited to a workspace | yes |
| Message | Somebody wrote to you directly, or named you in a channel | instant channels only |
Important is what a channel falls back to when you choose only what needs me. The in-app inbox always gets everything — it is the source of truth, not a channel.
A due-date reminder is sent once per task per due date. Moving a deadline is a new deadline and earns a new reminder; missing one does not earn a daily repeat of the same sentence.
Notifications are ordinary synced rows, so the inbox works offline and marking something read on your phone marks it read on your laptop.
Making it quieter
Section titled “Making it quieter”Settings → Notifications. In rough order of how much they help:
A summary instead of each one — off, daily or weekly. It widens the batching window for you alone. Mentions and assignments still go out on the normal window; a digest that swallows those is a digest people turn off.
Only what needs me — per channel. Drops everything not marked important above.
Per conversation, in chat — the bell at the top of a channel. All messages, only mentions, or nothing. Muting beats a mention.
Unfollow things. You are followed automatically when assigned, when you comment and when you create. The Follow button on a task or page is also an unfollow button.
The four channels
Section titled “The four channels”In-app inbox. Always on. The bell in the sidebar.
Email. Off unless whoever runs the instance has pointed it at a mail relay — and if they have not, you are not missing anything, because the inbox has it. Email is batched into one message per person rather than one per event, and every message carries a one-click unsubscribe that works without signing in.
A banner on this device. Settings → Notifications turns on Web Push for the browser you are sitting at, and asks for permission only when you press the switch. Permission belongs to a browser, and somebody who wants banners on their phone rarely wants them on the machine the app is already open on all day.
The push itself carries nothing — no title, no text. Your browser receives an empty ping and the app fetches the notification itself over the same session, so nothing of yours sits on a push service’s disk.
Telegram. The one that reaches a phone in a second without a browser being open. If the operator has configured a bot, Settings → Notifications → Telegram → Connect gives you a link; tapping Start in Telegram connects your own chat.
The order matters and is not decoration: a bot cannot message somebody who has not written to it
first, so there is no version of this where an admin points your notifications anywhere. Kolibri
never learns a phone number. Disconnect from either end — the button here, or /stop in the
chat.
When email stops arriving
Section titled “When email stops arriving”Two ordinary reasons before you assume a bug:
- The instance has no mail relay configured. Settings → Notifications says so plainly, and labels a local capture inbox as a capture inbox so it can never be mistaken for delivery.
- Your address was suppressed. A permanent bounce or a spam complaint stops Kolibri writing to an address again. Suppressed addresses are listed in Settings → Notifications and can be cleared by hand — the person it happened to is the one who knows it is fixed. A full mailbox or a greylisting does not suppress; that is a bad afternoon, not a dead address.
What is deliberately not here
Section titled “What is deliberately not here”No email-in. You cannot file a task by writing to an address — receiving mail means running a mail server, which is a much bigger commitment than sending. A commit can reach a task, through an incoming webhook.