Is "Emails on push" separate from "Notifications Settings"? If so, why?

[Christian Walther]

I am using GitLab CE 7.9.0 and am confused about its email notification capabilities. I am hoping someone here can explain to me which parts of the incomprehensible behavior are intentional and which are due to misconfiguration on my part or bugs in GitLab.

Under Profile Settings > Notifications I have selected "Watch" (and all groups and projects set to "global"), which is labeled "You will receive *all* notifications from projects in which you participate". However, my experience is a different one. I receive *very few* email notifications from projects in which I participate (I do receive *some*, e.g. "Access to group was granted" and "Project was moved", so the basic email setup seems to be working). In particular, I do not get notifications for pushes, which are the ones I would most importantly expect, and other events that are listed in my dashboard Atom feed, such as people joining projects, deleted branches, comments on commits.

Then there seems to be a completely separate system under Project > Settings > Services > Emails on push where I can enter my email address. When I do that, I indeed receive push notifications on that address, but I don't understand why I should have to enter my email address again here. GitLab already knows my email address, and it knows that I am interested in this project (from my "Watch" setting).

Is it correct and intentional that push notifications are not part of what the notification settings page calls "all notifications"? Or am I doing something wrong?

What is the purpose of the "Emails on push" service? From its user interface (input field for arbitrary email addresses, configuration per project) I get the impression that it is not intended for notifications to project contributors (what I am missing) but e.g. to a public mailing list. Is that correct? If so, what is the intended way for project contributors to get email notifications of pushes? Is there one?

-Christian

[Karen Carias]

Hello Christian. 

You'd need to manually set your email notifications. Here's documentation about it http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/notifications.html.

[Christian Walther]

Karen Carias wrote:
> You'd need to manually set your email notifications. Here's documentation about it http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/notifications.html.

Thank you for that link, the table at the bottom of that page is very helpful. I was looking for something like that in the documentation pages of our local GitLab installation but couldn't find it - it didn't occur to me that it could be hidden beneath "Workflow Using GitLab functionality and importing projects from GitHub and SVN."

So that answers my question that what I'm seeing is indeed intended behavior. I'm getting few notifications because notification only covers some administrative events that are inherently rare as well as events related to issues and merge requests, which we aren't using at this time.

I am still somewhat puzzled however as to *why* the set of events that goes into notifications and the set of events that goes into the Dashboard feed are different, and why pushes are not part of the former but have their own completely separate and different email notification system.

-Christian

[Karen Carias]

This is the way it's designed to be. You'd need to configure it according to your needs.