Recent Subscriber Notification changes and FAQs

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Keeping you informed is our priority. In this article, we're excited to share a brief rundown of two significant updates to our Subscriber Notifications feature on Statuspage. Adding to that, we'll be addressing some of your most frequently asked questions.

Recent Updates:

Starting with the new feature, MS Teams Subscriber notifications. You can now subscribe to receive updates on incidents from Statuspage directly in your MS Teams channel. You can do this just with the incoming webhook connector in MS Teams. You can find more details in our Support doc.

Secondly, we have introduced Two-step verification for email subscribers when they are trying to manage their Subscriptions. In some cases, email subscription allows users to manage subscriptions of the other subscribers. To avoid this, from 11th March 2024, if an existing Email subscriber enters their email address and clicks on Subscribe, it’ll send OTP to their email address and will take them to the manage subscription page only when the OTP is verified.

If you want to get started with Enabling the subscribers and managing the Notifications, you can refer to our detailed doc here.

Frequently asked questions:

1. Why subscriber notifications are not sent for the new Incident?
   
   We do not send subscriber notifications just for the component change. It’ll be sent only when Incidents are created. It is mandatory to have components selected and “Send notifications“ enabled while creating Incidents. If the notifications are not sent, please check if it was enabled while creating the Incident. If the notifications are sent for certain users and not for others, check if there are any restrictions set by the email admin for those users. If there are no restrictions, reach out to our support team here.

2. How to check if the notification has been sent successfully?
   
   From the Incident UI, you can check the bell icon next to each updates done on the Incident. Please find the below example,
   Notification Not sent,
   
   
   Sent successfully,
   
   
   

   If the notification icon is disabled, please check if components are selected and send notification is checked while sending updates.
   Otherwise, the notification icon is enabled and if you are still not having the notifications delivered, you can reach the support team here.
   
   

3. What is the timeout duration for Webhook notifications?
   
   Statuspage will be expecting a response from a Webhook endpoint within 30seconds. Adding to that, it’ll be expecting a 2xx status code, 3xx will be considered a failure.
   
   

4. Why subscribers are marked as Quarantined subscribers?
   
   - Email subscribers will be quarantined if they receive a permanent failure response like an invalid email or emails marked as Spam.
   - SMS subscribers will be quarantined after a permanent failure like an invalid number or number deactivated.
   - Webhook subscribers are quarantined after we have made 10 failed HTTP requests to the subscriber's endpoint over the course of approximately an hour.
   
   

5. What happens when the Subscriber is Quarantined?
   
   Quarantined subscribers will not receive any notifications. Quarantined subscribers will be permanently unsubscribed after 90 days. You can reactivate the subscriber from Subscribers –> Quarantined section.
   
   

6. What are the supported countries for SMS notifications?
   
   You can find the list of supported countries for SMS delivery in this document. Phone numbers in other regions might experience various issues.
   
   

7. Why I’m receiving SMS notifications from different numbers for the subscribed Statuspage?
   
   The number that SMS notifications are sent through depends on the carrier and can sometimes change without notice, so they might not always come from the same number.
   
   

8. Why is it failing to auto-confirm newly added subscribers unlike before when subscribers were added without accepting the confirmation email?
   
   Previously, it was possible for subscribers to be added to Statuspage components without requiring the user to "confirm" their subscription. However, our Engineering team has decided to no longer support this functionality to prevent users from being spammed with emails from Atlassian that they did not choose to receive. 

   Therefore, all users who have been subscribed to a Statuspage component will need to confirm their subscription via the confirmation email to receive future notifications about the component. You can also refer to this community post for more details.
   
   

9. Can we receive notifications when a user subscribes using a distribution list?
   
   Statuspage product doesn't have a built-in feature that specifically notifies all members of a distribution list. Using a Distribution List (DL) as a subscriber can result in any of the recipients on the DL effectively unsubscribing everyone else. For this reason, we strongly encourage you to avoid subscribing to a Distribution List on your page, and instead, subscribe to individual email addresses.
   
   

10. Why do some of the email notifications come with the title “Statuspage” and others come from noreply@statuspage.io?
    
    We title emails as "Statsupage" for admin notifications because it is always the email address we will use when communicating with admins. However, for Subscriber emails default sender is "noreply@statuspage.io". You can also setup a custom email address for your page if you would like to send it from a specific email address.

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