Article version: GitHub.com
About email notifications
When you enable email notifications, you will receive participating and watching notifications in your email client, and you can filter them using the email header information.
For more information about the differences between participating and watching notifications, see "About notifications."
After enabling email notifications, GitHub will send notifications to you as multipart emails that contain both HTML and plain text copies of the content. Email notification content includes any Markdown, @mentions, emojis, hash-links, and more, that appear in the original content on GitHub. If you only want to see the text in the email, you can configure your email client to display the plain text copy only. For more information about enabling email notifications, see "Choosing the delivery method for your notifications."
Tip: If you receive both web and email notifications, you can automatically sync the read or unread status of the notification so that web notifications are automatically marked as read once you've read the corresponding email notification. To enable this sync, your email client must be able to view images from 'notifications@github.com'.
If you're using Gmail, you can click a button beside the notification email to visit the original issue or pull request that generated the notification.
Filtering email notifications
Each email notification that GitHub sends contains header information. The header information in every email is consistent, so you can use it in your email client to filter or forward all GitHub notifications, or certain types of GitHub notifications.
Email notifications from GitHub contain the following header information:
| Header | Information |
|---|---|
From address |
This address will always be 'notifications@github.com'. |
To field |
This field connects directly to the thread. If you reply to the email, you'll add a new comment to the conversation. |
Cc address |
GitHub will Cc you if you're subscribed to a conversation. The second Cc email address matches the notification reason. The suffix for these notification reasons is @noreply.github.com. The possible notification reasons are:
|
mailing list field |
This field identifies the name of the repository and its owner. The format of this address is always <repository name>.<repository owner>.github.com. |
X-GitHub-Severity field |
Email notifications for security alerts that affect one or more repositories include the X-GitHub-Severity header field. You can use the value of the X-GitHub-Severity header field to filter email notifications for security alerts. |
The possible severity levels are:
|