Redmine

The notification function in redmine is a very important for our users, but indeed at the moment it created to mucg spam and is less configurable for individeual user requirements.
Redmine lacks a notification engine which let user configure what he will be informed on a project based level, on which changes, on which item types, how often and how fine grained the notification will be.

The email notification is only necesarry and useful when user can set on which events and how often he shall get notified, so inbox wil only popup valuable messages.

E.g on news changes every week with all changes of the week, or on new bugs every day at 7 o'clock right with the stand up meeting with a summary of all new bugs and on changes of tickets i am owner or watcher immidiately.

It would need a extension on the user account menue with an extensiable list where you can choose "event type" and "notification schedule" and "notification format" for ur notications. These complete view shall be shortcut accessiable from the items overview sites, e.g issue list of thread list.

An Notification entry consists of 3 parts: Event type, Notification schedule and Notification Format

1. Event type: is new or change on any item, eg. news, issue, thread, file

1.1 New: Just a new entry in any project i am involved and have view rights

1.2 Change: changes on Item in project i am involved, have view rights and the filter is met. If no filter is set any change will be notified.
Optional filter settings for this kind of event: oOne ore more fields (or relation) for which the the change event shall fired can be choosen, so only if the fields are changed or set to a certain value use gets notified. In view that would mean you could addfilter items to a list where every list item consists of "Event type" (e.g issue) field and filter value (e.g certain value or "any change"). For an easy first step all tems can be concatenated logical with "and".
This way a filter can set be defined too, that only notifies for changes i am author or watcher and on special projects.

2. Notification schedule

- immidiately (means one item per notification)
- hourly (all changes in this hour)
- daily (all changes this day and optional set time when to fire notification)
- weekly (all changes this week and optional set day time when to fire notification)

- on every login (for pop windows only)

3. Notification format

- Email
- browser window popup

- short summary (means item topic and link)
- average summary (topic and info on changed fields and author of change and link)
- full summary ( complete meta data of item and link)

There are some plugins which tried to extend redmine standard notification features, but none of them eanbles the user this way.
Of course users can update with rss and activity page ( i only use this and love it) but the email notification is still the defactor standard "non it" users prefer and will use.

Improvment on this side will also open paths towards other information drop palces e.g mobile or web services like twitter notification, because the model only needs another notification format, e.g SMS or twitter to be added