Managing watch notifications for email management
Proposal
Watch notifications can generate lots of email. As noted in this other issue, it can be easy for a small number of updates to a largly watched project to generate quite a lot of email sends to users who may not be actively logging into the instance.
Proposals
- Purging watches from accounts that have not logged in for a set amount of time could help curb this volume of email. At the instance level, a default watch expiration could be set that would purge watches from accounts that have not logged in for 6 months (for example). Not only would this cut down on the volume of email notifications, it would also cut down on the volume of notifications the instance of GitLab has to process.
- A way to selectively disable watch notifications for extremely busy repositories would be valuable, as it was mentioned in gitlab-com/gl-infra/production#17404 (comment 1735091350) we went ahead and disabled watches for gitlab-org/gitlab to deal with excessive emails, and in the case of our repository there is probably no reason why anyone should have watch notifications enabled.
Edited by John Jarvis