Notification preferences

There are two levels of control here, and it is worth knowing which one to reach for.

Your own preferences

Under your profile settings you choose which events raise a notification for you, and whether they also reach your email inbox.

The useful split for most people at a firm:

• In the portal, for everything — document uploads, assignments, status changes, signature activity and messages. The list is filterable, so volume there costs little; see Notifications and alerts.
• By email, only for what interrupts your day — a signature completed, a message from a client, work assigned to you.

Emailing yourself about every upload trains you to ignore the emails, which is worse than not sending them.

The firm’s defaults

An admin sets the firm’s defaults under Settings → Organization → Notifications. This is the right place to fix a problem everybody has. If the whole firm is drowning in the same alert, turning it down once here beats twenty people each turning it off.

Individuals can still adjust their own preferences afterwards.

For clients

Clients have the same control over their own notifications. When a client says they never heard about a document, check three things in this order: that it was actually assigned to them, that their email address on file is right, and only then their preferences.

Turning things off safely

One rule: do not turn off signature notifications. A signature request that nobody is told about is a request that sits pending until somebody notices the status in a list, which in practice means weeks.