Any way to turn off automatic Confluence Email Updates which are triggered through various macros ?

[Michael Biwer]

Various macro force an email update to be sent to users that are watching the space or the page. Such macro are below. Is there anyway to block these automatic emails that are generated so Clients, Project Leaders and other parties do not get flooded with emails ?

Known Macros:

• Gliffy Diagram Viewing Macro
• Microsoft Office Attachment Viewers 
  • Excel
• Page Creation/Deletion
• etc ...

I assume that other people using Confluence Page heavily know what I am talking about and since many companies have restrictions on Email Inbox Sizes this is becoming an issue with many people on all levels of Confluence Use.

So I figured that I would put this question out to the general community to see if there has been anyone else having this same issue.

Is there anyway a "custom macro" could be created to bypass at least some of these Email being sent ? I am not familiar with the use/creation of custom Confluence Macros so please include in-depth details.

[Mike Rathwell · Accepted solution]

Michael,

Maybe custom creation of macros isn't the way to go; one more thing to maintain. I had the same issue. We do have size limited email boxes here as well but it wasn't even that as the messages are pretty small; rather it was just that there were so dang many messages from absolutely everything that happened. I had that really bad when I first upgraded to 5.5 (a version known to be exceedingly chatty) and it wasn't the inbox size issues that I got complaints about.

"This version of Confluence makes too many emails. Please please please make it stop!!!!!"

I was able to drastically reduce the volume of emails with two things:

1. Teach people about the "unwatch" function. It was surprising how many didn't know about that. True there are pages you want to watch and put up with the noise but it weeded out the ones people didn't worry that much about.
2. Add the "No Email Storm" plugin. This is a truly awesome free plugin that changes the page save from default save (where you have to remember to tick the "don't send updates" box) to two buttons: One that is just "Save" (and the highlighted blue one) which does NOT send an email update after any page create/update action) and one that is NOT highlighted that still does notify.

Between those two things, we massively reduced the noise from Confluence in our email.

Hope this helps

mike