Managing GitHub influx of notification emails

Community
1

I suspect many people here involved in many GitHub projects or following many people on GitHub receive 10s or 100s of emails every day regarding various things happening on GitHub. Some emails are more important than others. Some mention you specifically or relate to tier 1 packages on your list that you really care about, while others you can leave hanging for a while but you want to come back to them, and others are simply not important. I have personally been guilty of missing a few important notifications or mentions before, that I later noticed. This sends a wrong message of rudeness or indifference to some people, some of whom could be even potential or current employers! I am curious how people here manage their long GitHub email lists. Do you use a special email filtering system? Is there an app out there that can make this part of OSS development less stressful?

3 Likes
2

You can make github only email for direct mentions. That’s what I do. It works pretty well.

4 Likes
3

Also many e-mail clients will let you set “filters” where you can write something like “GitHub”, and it will route all of the email with that(or other) keywords to a folder in your e-mail.

1 Like
4

Apart from the excellent technical solutions suggested above, I think that socially it is just best if

  1. people don’t read too much into not getting an immediate answer (everyone has busy periods where they don’t want to break focus),

  2. at the same time, friendly pings after a reasonable interval (2 weeks?) are tolerated or even appreciated, so that issues that got lost in the noise get a second chance, and these should get a more or less immediate answer, even if along the lines of “sorry I am super-busy now, let’s get back to this later, feel free to ping”

  3. everyone involved understands that a lot of FOSS packages are hobby projects, with kind people donating their time and expertise, and no one should stress about anything, really. It does not help one iota. And if an otherwise useful package seems to be abandoned, you can always fork.

5 Likes
5

I ended up setting up a new email just for GitHub. Then I setup a bunch of filters, one for mentions, one for all my personal packages and one for each organization I am part of. Thanks for the suggestions!

1 Like