Do you configure your GitHub Notifications?

Notifications from GitHub can be quite a pain, as they send a lot of emails. This leads to many developers ignoring the important emails they receive.

Github

❌ Figure: Bad example - lots of notifications

To reduce this spam and to make the notifications have value, make sure to configure your GitHub Notifications.

✅ Figure: Good example - Turn off Watching settings

Turning off Watching notifications significantly reduces the number of spam emails you receive. With this setting, you won't get notified about actions like PR approvals or comments that aren't related to you.

✅ Figure: Good example - Workflow notification settings

The important one here is to make sure the item marked Send notifications for failed workflows only is checked, so that you receive emails for failures in your deployments.

Outlook

You often want to receive emails when you’re @mentioned or someone requests your review on a pull request, but you probably don’t want to then subscribe to every future thing that happens about it.

You can add a rule in Outlook to automatically delete these:

Figure: How to configure the rule in Outlook