Notifications

Notifications let you react to Files.com activity by sending messages or events to other tools. Use them when you need awareness, an audit trail, or automation outside Files.com without polling. Choose the notification feature that best meets your needs, as each offers unique capabilities.

How Notifications Work

Notifications in Files.com send messages about file and folder activity (uploads, downloads, changes, copying, moving or deleting). The messages are sent either by email to a human or directly to an external system, which processes the message or sends it on to other systems or humans.

Every type of notification is associated with a folder, and activity in that folder generates messages. By default, activity in sub-folders also generates messages for the notification, but the notification can be configured to only include activity directly in the folder.

All of the supported types of file actions (uploads, downloads, changes, copying, moving or deleting) trigger a message unless you configure your notification to only handle specific actions.

Files.com notifications to an external system can be configured only by a user with administrative-level permissions. This applies to notifications for Webhooks, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and Amazon SNS.

In contrast, Email notifications are designed to be received by humans, and they are sent directly to a specific user's email address. While administrator users can create Email notifications for groups or for other users, those other users can create their own Email notifications for themselves. To comply with spam laws, Email notifications also allow individuals to unsubscribe from those notifications.

What Information Is Sent in a Notification

Each time that matching folder history generates a notification, the message that is sent contains the most relevant information indicating what happened, who performed the action, and when it happened.

Messages about file actions include the type of action taken, what path was affected, the destination path (for copies and moves), the user who performed the action, and the file size. Activity on folders does not include the file size because folders do not have a file size.

For both file and folder operations, the user who performed the action is not included in the message if the user is not known. This happens whenever a site-wide API key is used.

The format of the notification message (email message, JSON payload, etc.) is specific to each feature, so messages about the same file activity will not be formatted identically across all of the available notification types.

Timing of Notification Messages

Most of the available notification types send messages to the external system immediately after the activity happens. Files.com does not delay before sending messages to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webhooks, Amazon SNS, or Google Cloud Pub/Sub. Each file operation generates its own separate message to these systems, and multiple operations are not combined into a single notification.

Email notifications are not real-time; they are sent at configurable intervals. The minimum interval between notification emails is every 5 minutes. When multiple file actions occur within the same interval, a single message is created to capture all of the matching activity.

Choosing a Notification Feature

Notification features fall into two broad categories: user-centric Email notifications, and notifications to external systems.

Use Email notifications when a human should read and act. This fits approvals, exceptions, and “someone should know” alerts.

For real-time notifications to external systems, choose the notification designed for your specific system:

Use Slack webhooks when you want lightweight visibility in a Slack channel.

Use Microsoft Teams when your org’s default alerting surface is Teams. Treat it like Slack: human-visible, low-friction notifications.

Use Amazon SNS when you want Files.com events to land inside AWS for fan-out. This fits routing to SQS, Lambda, or other SNS subscribers.

Use Google Cloud Pub/Sub when you want Files.com events to land inside GCP. This fits routing to Cloud Functions, Dataflow, or other Pub/Sub subscribers.

Use Webhooks when a system should react. This fits triggering workflows or kicking off downstream processing.

Notifications Do Not Include Remote Server Activity

Files.com allows you to attach Remote Servers to your site, which means that your files exist outside of Files.com's native storage but can be affected by users in your site. Notifications alert you to changes in this attached remote storage only when the file activity is performed using your Files.com site.

Only activity that occurs through the Files.com platform can trigger a notification from Files.com.

When you are connected using any Files.com client application (the web interface, the desktop app or mobile app, the CLI, any Files.com SDK, or protocol-based file transfer), you are using the Files.com site, even when you are interacting with files on a Remote Server Mount. Because Syncs and Automations exist in your Files.com site, any activity by Syncs or Automations can generate notification messages, even when it targets a Remote Server. When you use your Files.com site in any of these ways to interact with the contents of attached remote storage, your site can send notifications for those activities.

In contrast, directly modifying files on remote systems without using your Files.com site cannot generate notifications. This is because there is no way for your Files.com site to know about the activity performed in other systems.

Notifications vs Expectations

Notifications provide information about file and folder activity that occurs. Expectations let you define when and where to watch for specific kinds of file actions, so you can monitor what isn't happening.

Use Notifications Instead of Polling

We strongly urge against creating your own system to poll your site to check whether important events have occurred.

A reliable polling system requires you to plan for re-trying failed operations, logging the results and handling errors, monitoring that your automation remains healthy, and transferring knowledge of the process as staffing changes. This consumes time and effort, and it requires API calls that don't directly support your business processes.

Instead of building your own monitoring system for important activity, use the notifications feature that integrates best with your infrastructure. To keep track of important activity that did not happen when it was anticipated, use Expectations instead.

Emails from Files.com

Several Files.com features generate email messages. Refer to Emails from Files.com when you need to control or troubleshoot outbound mail (sender settings, deliverability, unsubscribes). Start here when “email notifications aren’t arriving.”