My users have not stopped complaining about the amount of email phabricator generates in many use cases, and we have found it a major barrier to adoption of the tool internally for ticketing. People have a bad experience with tool out of the box, and as a result instead of tweaking it, they end up just not using it [phabricator]. We like the tool, and want to promote it's use, and grow into it's other functionality over time.

Problematic use cases for tasks:

• adding a cc
• changing workboard columns
• renaming tasks
• changing tags

In my organization and with my users, even the following is considered too spammy for tasks, though some users would likely turn this back on in their own preferences:

• changing priority
• editing description

We really like that it notifies on creation, comment, and when block status changes of tasks.

We don't want phabricator to change how it comes out of the box, your workflow and users may be different then ours. We would really like the option to set our own defaults for our own users, exactly like we did with the configuration options, because we know our needs.

How we'd like to see it done: I would like to be able to set the default values for user email notification, similarly to how I can specify configuration options. This include the self-notification option.

I did a search but frankly there are so many different email tasks that all talk about very specific things (roles! cc only when the author! self-notification!) that I wasn't sure if this was properly addressed or not, at least in more than an offhand comment. I also don't want some big golden egg solution that will be implemented much further down the line (roles), I would rather have a simpler solution like this.

The existing proposed solution and why they are problematic for us:

• set up mail client filtering rules (from the docs): Honestly most of our users are not familiar or comfortable enough to set up email rules. Further, if we know the vast majority of our users would prefer a certain profile, why are we incurring network bandwidth and mailbox storage on this? And yes, we are on a quota system. This is not something I can change or get changed.
• users should change their own email preferences after the fact: Maybe the "Stop receiving emails like this" quick link in the email would be better than "EMAIL PREFERENCES", but in our experience the vast majority of users do not bother to change their preferences. This is also a reaction to getting what they perceive as unsolicited email, why do they have to opt-out? Why can't it be opt-in? Some preferences are even confusing, like it talks about "Owner" but we only have "author" and "assignee", both of which could be construed as owner. There are also so many email preferences that it's overwhelming. If it's not worth displaying on first login, it's probably unreasonable not to have a good system wide default.
• you should use a patch or SQL query to change it (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27262833/phabricator-global-email-preferences): This is really bound to break. We already maintain patches for some features in phabricator (realname display that isn't configurable everywhere, just emails and dropdowns). Just like we don't want to have a patch to change a configuration option, we don't want to for user emails. This is really a last resort, one we may explore eventually but is really not ideal.

I'm not sure if Herald allows me to squash email notifications, I've been playing around with it but it doesn't seem like "Do Nothing" means "Do not send this notification". That and the subject line contains I have available put multiple options together. Even if it did, this would completely override the user preference and would not be a good solution even if possible.

Feel free to merge this into whatever other ticket you think it belongs in, I honestly couldn't figure out where it belonged, even if I saw a lot of users asking for it in passing.

Thanks