Email is an optional capability of livedocuments. It only does anything when the deployment has been set up to send mail. It goes only to signed-in users, because email needs an address and a guest identity has none. The editor itself never needs an account or an email, so this is purely additive.
What we might send
There are three groups:
- Tips and check-ins. A short welcome when you first sign in, a nudge a few days later if you have not made a document yet, a couple of getting-started notes over your first two weeks, and a friendly nudge if you have been away for about four weeks. These come from liveworkspace, your account across its apps, so you get one series however many of them you use. The welcome goes straight away; everything after it can be turned off.
- Notifications about your work. Each has its own switch:
- Someone else comments on a document you own (at most one email per document every 15 minutes, however busy the thread).
- Someone opens one of your shared documents through its link for the first time (at most one email per document every 15 minutes). Only people signed in to an account count, and never you.
- A teammate @mentions you in a comment on a team document, or assigns you an action on an element. Each comment or assignment emails you once, and only people in the document's team can reach you this way.
- Milestones. A small celebration when you make your tenth document, and when you share a document for the first time. Each comes once.
- Account messages. A confirmation when you delete your account. It is tied to something you did, so it always sends.
Team invitations, the note telling a team's admins that someone accepted or declined one, and the heads-up in the last week before one of your API tokens expires come from liveworkspace, your account across its apps, rather than from livedocuments.
What an email contains
Notification emails keep your work out of your inbox. A comment notification tells you who commented and on which document, with a link to open it, but not what the comment said. A mention is the exception, because it was written to you: it quotes the comment (cut short if it is long). An assigned action carries its name and the start of its description, and names the document only if you can open it. Nothing else from the document, and never a picture of it, goes into an email.
Turning them off
Open Settings, go to Account, then Notifications beneath it (the account menu's Account opens Settings on Account, one step away). The Email section has one switch per optional kind: Someone Joins My Document, Someone Comments on My Document, Someone Mentions Me in a Comment, Someone Assigns Me an Action, Someone Responds to a Team Invite, Tips and Check-Ins, and Milestones. They are all on until you turn them off. The whole row is the switch, so click anywhere on it.
Every email you can turn off carries a "Manage your notifications" link in its footer that opens these switches, and mail apps that show a native unsubscribe button point at the same place. Only the welcome email has no link.
The switches are saved to your liveworkspace account, so they apply wherever you are signed in, and the change takes effect before the next email would go out. Most of them are shared by every liveworkspace app, and say All apps under their description: turning one off here turns it off in the others too. Account messages (the deletion confirmation, and liveworkspace's token-expiry heads-up) are not on this list, because they confirm something rather than nudge you.
As a guest, the same place shows a short note asking you to sign in instead of the switches. In-Editor Notifications, above them, is a different thing: it controls the brief confirmations inside the editor and never sends email.
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