Inbox

What happened while you were away, on the issues you follow and the ones somebody put your name on.

What lands there

A run moving from queued to dispatched is not in there. That is machinery rather than information, and an inbox that reports machinery stops being read.

You are never told about your own doing. Nobody needs a notification saying they commented.

Following

An inbox needs a list of who cares, or "who should hear about this" gets guessed separately in every place that asks — and the guesses disagree.

You start following an issue when you:

• open it
• are assigned it
• comment on it
• are mentioned in it

Or by pressing Follow in the issue's properties panel.

Naming somebody

Type @ in a comment and pick a colleague. They get an inbox row saying they were named, whether or not they were following the issue — a mention is addressed to a person, not to a thread — and they start following it from then on.

• ↑ ↓ move, Enter or Tab picks, Escape closes
• The list holds colleagues and agents, and says which is which: naming an agent hands it the thread and queues a run, which is a different act from telling somebody
• You can still type a name by hand. The picker exists because you had to spell it exactly

A name two people answer to names nobody. With two colleagues called Arne Berg, or two called Knut, @Arne Berg and @Knut resolve to neither of them and no inbox row is filed. Reaching nobody is the better failure: telling the wrong colleague looks exactly like telling the right one, and the person who was actually needed never finds out they were named.

For those, the picker inserts an exact form — @user:12 — and shows the address beside the name so you can tell them apart while choosing. The posted comment reads @Arne Berg like any other; only the composer shows the key, and only where a name genuinely is shared.

You cannot name a director. The Management role has no inbox — it is behind the same gate as the issue — so a mention would file a row nobody can open and send an email pointing at a page that answers 403.

Nobody is told about their own mention. Writing @yourself still reads as a mention on the page; it just does not arrive.

Leaving is remembered. Press Stop following and your own old comment will not drag you back the next time somebody replies. That is the difference between unsubscribing and unsubscribing until further notice.

Reading it

• Unread is the default view, because that is the question you arrived with
• Mark all read when you have skimmed and decided
• Clear takes an item out of the inbox and deletes nothing: the issue, the comment and the run are all still there
• Clicking an item opens the issue and marks it read on the way. It is a real link, so ⌘-click or middle-click opens it in a tab — which is how anybody actually works through a list. A row opened that way stays unread, because nothing has been read yet
• A status change says where the issue went, not merely that it moved. done and canceled are both closed and mean opposite things, and a row saying neither is a row nobody can scan

Cleared notifications can be deleted. Per row, or Empty for the whole tab — and they are deleted for good, because a notification is a receipt rather than a record: everything it points at survives on its own. Cleared rows are also purged automatically after thirty days, so nobody has to do housekeeping on the database's behalf. See Operations for the schedule and the setting.

The unread count in the sidebar updates itself over the websocket. A count that is a page-load out of date is the difference between an inbox and a list you remember to check.

Email

Email follows the inbox rather than duplicating it. Under Settings there are three choices:

Before this, every comment on an issue you were part of sent an email and there was no way to say otherwise. Everything still lands in the inbox whichever you pick; the setting only decides what also reaches your mailbox.

Comment emails carry a reply address, so answering one lands in the thread — see Email.

Not there yet

• No snooze. An item is unread, read, or cleared.
• No digest. Nothing arrives as one summary at nine in the morning.
• No per-issue muting separate from following. Leaving a thread is the only way to quieten it.
• Agents have no inbox. They are handed work through the task queue, which is their equivalent, and they read a task envelope rather than a list.