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I am designing an email notification setting for an ERP.

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Based on the image above:

  1. User selected the 'Hourly' option for email notification.
  2. In the first hour away from the system, the user gets 3 new notifications and this update is emailed to the user "3 new notifications since your last login {date}{time}".
  3. For the 2nd-hour user is away, user gets 1 additional new notification.

Should the system send the second email as '4 new notifications'(total #notifications of all hours away) or '1 new notification'? (only #notification in that hour).

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  • This is a simple process if you are comfortable with Dynamic Email (gmail's announcement), This is an easy task. Consider an example: Take commenting in Google Docs, for example. Instead of receiving individual email notifications when someone mentions you in a comment, now, you’ll see an up-to-date thread in Gmail where you can easily reply or resolve the comment, right from within the message. (quoted from the above linked article)
    – NotStanding with GoGotaHome
    Jan 22, 2022 at 5:23
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    Probably this is obvious but just to be safe: No matter which option you choose, please only use new notifications for deciding whether another email should be sent or not. Hourly notifications for the same unread notification would be very annoying
    – lucidbrot
    Jan 22, 2022 at 10:19

3 Answers 3

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As the user requested hourly updates, they'd probably be confused if notifications from previous updates were included.

Of course, the text has to be modified: 1 new notification since last update.

A proposal for giving full information: 1 new notification since last update, in total 4 notifications unread.

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    'unread' might be a bad choice of words, as you don't know whether the user read the last email (e.g. after you sent the new email). "in total 4 notifications since last login" sounds safer/more correct.
    – David Mulder
    Jan 23, 2022 at 4:54
  • Of course, the exact wording is up to debate :-)
    – Gerda
    Jan 24, 2022 at 11:03
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You could section the email into "New Notification" and "Unread Notification" sections as Gerda suggested. This has a real benefit for users that might be away for multiple hours.

For example, if a user was offline for a full day and they wake up to 24 new emails from you, they could just read that last email sent to see a full day's work of misread notification instead of having to read all 24 emails.

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To reply to your title No. Each new email should have only the past hour unread notification, otherwise the user inevitably will scan the read ones every time.

I myself when I read on Gmail the x platform's notification I check if they are read/unread and then their date and time.

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