What happens if you enable Confluence email notifications after years running without it?

Question

Hello,

we want to enable email notifications in Confluence so that users are notified about changes on their favourite pages, but after years of running Confluence without email notifications, we are not sure what will happen.

a) Does Confluence send email notifications about past changes? The NOTIFICATIONS database table with 15k entries makes me nervous.

b) Is it possible to bulk change the email settings of all current users?

c) Is it possible to define a default for the email settings for new / future users?

d) Is there a best-practice for testing this on the staging server (like a Mail server that rewrites new mails into files instead of sending them out) (no Confluence-related question probably)

Thanks in advance,
Christian

Christian_hebg4q · Answer

Hey @Nick Reilingh,

thanks for your answer. It's good to hear that they probably won't send out 15k old notifications. Can you say something about the other points (user profile stuff) or do you have any experience there?

Nick Reilingh_gcfxaz · Answer

In the past, I've wanted to make a bunch of mandatory-notification changes (related to calendars) but suppress the emails, and I did this by temporarily unconfiguring confluence's email settings. When I reconfigured them, confluence did not send a backlog of notifications, it just continued from the present point.

I would guess this is because the notification send is tied to the page save transaction, not kept in a buffer and then batch sent. But I will note that confluence server 5.10 does change the way email notifications are sent by batching them every 10 minutes. But I still wouldn't expect it to automatically send thousands of emails just because you configured an SMTP server.