Skip to content

Email subscriptions for issues and merge requests

Description

I experienced that some contributors (or some customers) actually don't have an account. Currently, this means that they do not receive notifications about issues they might have to follow, and checking the web interface all day can be quite annoying.

Proposal

I would like an option to subscribe an email address to issues and merge requests or even to entire projects.
This could be done in an overlay or in a new window to not block huge areas of the issue page with big mailing lists.

Links / references

NA.

Documentation blurb

Overview

What is it?
A new feature which allows adding email addresses to receive notifications about issues and merge requests.

Why should someone use this feature?
Customers might want to stay informed about certain issues and/or merge requests. Adding their email to the issue is a faster and more practicable way to make them receive notifications than to create a new account for them. In addition to that, creating a new account might exhaust a GitLab EE installation's user limit.

What is the underlying (business) problem?
Notifying customers / external developers

How do you use this feature? I manually have to send emails to my customers to keep them informed about what happened after they reported a problem (MRs).

Use cases

Use case 1:

Bob uses “UltraGPG”, an Android-App to encrypt files on his phone. He notices that his secret key vanished and wants the app's developers to fix this problem. So he writes an email to “UltraSoftronics”, the company developing the app. They create a new merge request and add him to the mailing list in order to send all notifications automatically to his email address Bob can now track the merge request and see whether his problem is being fixed without having an account on the server's GitLab installation.

Use case 2:

UltraSoftronics is developing a desktop app which connects clients to their central cloud system. However, they do not run the cloud themselves, and one day a worker at the company providing the cloud notices that the API does not connect the clients properly. A week later the API has been fixed and the company providing the cloud asks UltraSoftronics to keep them up-to-date with their progress in integrating the new API into their desktop application. UltraSoftronics simply adds the company's CEO to the mailing list, so they receive notifications about the progress being made.

Feature checklist

Make sure these are completed before closing the issue, with a link to the relevant commit.