Email Notifications

Email notifications help teams stay synchronized and respond quickly to updates in their projects. When multiple users collaborate on projects involving large files or frequent document updates, manually checking for changes becomes inefficient and error-prone. With automatic notifications about important actions in monitored folders, teams can react immediately to new deliverables, review updated content without delay, and maintain workflow continuity.

This feature is particularly valuable for time-sensitive projects where delays in discovering new files can bottleneck entire teams. The generated emails also serve as a backup audit trail of folder activity for users who can't access history logs, helping organizations track project progress and ensure no critical updates go unnoticed.

Email notifications deliver information to Users or Groups about specific file operations in your site, pushing relevant activity history information to the people who need to take action. Email notifications are intended to alert humans rather than systems about important file actions. Site Administrators and folder admins can manage other users' notifications; other users must have History permissions to configure their own notification for a folder.

A user must meet a few important requirements to receive email notifications: their user account must not be disabled, they must have an email address, and they must not have unsubscribed from the notification or from all emails.

Email notifications are not real-time alerts. They are generated in batches, depending upon the interval configured in the notification options. They may be sent as often as every 5 minutes, as infrequently as once per day. There is no guarantee that activity will be reported at the exact interval, because the emails must be generated and sent. An email generated every 5 minutes might arrive more than 5 minutes after the activity took place. Users can update their preferences to choose the hour that they prefer to receive daily notifications.

Options for each notification allow each notification to target only relevant file activity.

Email notifications deliver branded, consistent email messages to users. Your site's custom branding options control the colors, logo, reply address and footer text in each message. Site Administrators also control whether emails include a link for the user to log in.

Files.com provides several logs for tracking whether email notification messages have been generated, which you can use for tracking down missing messages. Only activity which occurs through the Files.com platform and is captured in Files.com activity logs is reported in email notifications; activity that occurs outside of Files.com on remote servers does not generate this activity history and cannot trigger emails.

Email notifications allow users to unsubscribe from some or all of their email notifications. Users who can manage a notification can also delete that notification.

Email notifications are just 1 option for facilitating workflows by monitoring important activities. Webhooks provide real-time alerting capability and are designed for integrating with external systems, rather than humans. Share Link Notifications give visibility into web-based sharing activities with external contacts. Slack Webhooks and Microsoft Teams integrations let you connect your file activity with workplace collaboration platforms. Amazon SNS and Google Cloud Pub/Sub notifications allow your Files.com file activity to trigger rich workflows within your cloud provider system or to fan out messages beyond your Files.com users.

Setting Up Email Notifications

Users with folder admin rights can manage other users' notifications for the folders they manage. Site administrators can manage any user's notifications for any folder in the site.

Users who are not site administrators and do not have admin permissions for a folder must have the History permission to configure email notifications for their own user accounts. Notifications created by this type of user can only include folders for which they have History permission.

User Pre-Requisites to Receive Notifications

Email notifications can only be delivered to users who are correctly configured to receive them. All 4 of the following conditions must be true for any notification to be delivered to a user:

The user's account must not be disabled. Only currently enabled user accounts can receive email notifications. User accounts that have been disabled cannot connect to the Files.com site to take any action on file activity, so there is no value in delivering messages to those accounts.

The user's account must have an associated email address. Email messages require a valid destination email address.

The user must not be unsubscribed from the notification. To comply with anti-spam laws, Files.com does not deliver emails for a notification to users who have unsubscribed. When users unsubscribe from an email notification, the notification status is set to disabled. Disabled email notifications do not generate emails for the user.

The user must not be permanently opted out from all emails. Files.com complies with anti-spam regulations by allowing users to instruct the system to Don't email me anything, ever again. Opting out of receiving any emails from Files.com is permanent.

Email Notification Contents

Mail messages generated for email notifications are designed to provide enough information for a human to take the next appropriate action in response to file activity without overloading the reader.

Email subject lines for email notifications contain the phrase "Activity Notification". The reply-to address will be no-reply@files.com by default, but Site Administrators can change the address used for all email notifications to match your branding. Your customized colors and logo are used for notification emails. Site administrators can also configure a custom email footer that is included in all system-generated emails, including for email notifications.

When a custom message is configured for the notification, that is included in the notification email.

Notification emails include a list of the matching actions within the configured notification period, limited to the first 100. Each action includes the full path, what file action was taken, the file size (if the file was not deleted), the date and time of the action, and the associated user's name. If your notification includes Share Link visitor activity, no user name is included because the activity is not associated with a user.

If a site administrator has not disabled the Show "Log In" link in email setting, the email message will also include a link for users to click and immediately access the folder for the notification.

Each notification email includes a link to Update your mail preferences or unsubscribe from these e-mails. This link allows us to comply with anti-spam regulations and provides a way for users to unsubscribe from some or all email notifications. The link protects Files.com's sender reputation, which helps ensure emails sent by Files.com do not get treated as spam by other mail servers.

Notification Options

Every email notification has 3 required settings associated with it: the user or group who will receive the emails, the path that is being monitored for activity, and the frequency those mails will be sent.

Notifications also support a custom message, which helps users easily triage and appropriately respond to the incoming emails.

Other optional settings for each notification make sure you're notified only about the activity of interest. These options let you target your notification by limiting which users' activity triggers a notification, whether a notification includes activity in a child folder, which file actions should be included, and limiting what file names can cause an email notification.

Since activity from Share Link visitors is not included by default in a folder notification, you can update the notifications settings to track this type of activity.

Notifications and Remote Servers

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. Email notifications alert you to changes in this attached remote storage only when the file activity is performed using your Files.com site.

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. Syncs or Automations exist in your Files.com site, so any activity by Syncs or Automations performed using your Files.com site, even those on a Remote Server. This means that when you use your Files.com site in any of those ways to interact with the contents of attached remote storage, email notifications for folders on your remote storage generate notification emails.

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

Tracking Whether Notifications Were Sent

Check the history of the notification's folder to verify that there is activity for the folder that should generate the notification emails. If activity doesn't appear in your History listing, an email notification will not be generated.

Check the Outbound Emails log to determine whether an email was generated for your notification. The Outbound Emails Log will show each time an email is generated, the recipient address, and the delivery status. If the system sent an email that wasn't received by the user, you can be confident that the user and the notification are correctly configured within Files.com, and the problem lies with the recipient's email server, email account, or spam filters.

Once you've verified that emails are being correctly generated by your site, you can troubleshoot the configuration of the recipient email server.

When an outbound email was generated but rejected, this is known as an email bounce. Temporary problems are called a soft bounce. When the problem with the recipient's inbox is fixed, emails to that address will work correctly again.

Incorrect or misspelled email addresses result in a hard bounce, which requires you to fix the email address. A hard bounce means the recipient's server is signaling that the email address cannot be used, and we honor this signal by ceasing further email attempts to that address.

Deleting Notifications

You can delete email notifications for any folder that you have access to within the site; your permissions or administrative rights will determine whether you can delete other users' notifications. Site Administrators or users who have admin rights to a folder can remove email notifications for other users. Users can always disable their own notifications for a folder, either by deleting a notification that targets only their user account or by unsubscribing from the notification.

Notifications for Deleted Users

When a user account is deleted, any email notifications associated with that user are automatically removed.

Notifications for Disabled Users

When a user account is disabled, email notifications are not automatically deleted for the user, but emails will not be delivered until the user's account meets the requirements for receiving email notifications.

Unsubscribing from Some or All Email Notifications

Each notification email includes a link at the bottom to Update your mail preferences or unsubscribe from these e-mails. Clicking this link takes you to a page that lists all of your currently active notifications. You can disable individual emails or use the Permanent Removal Option to opt out of all future emails for all notifications. Choosing Don't email me anything, ever again is a permanent step, and cannot be undone, even by our support staff.

It is not possible to remove the unsubscribe link from emails sent from your Files.com site. This link is required to maintain our compliance with national and international privacy laws governing email distribution. The presence of this link also helps ensure emails sent by Files.com do not get treated as spam by other mail servers.