Notifications and subscriptions
You can choose to receive ongoing updates about specific activity on GitHub through a subscription. Notifications are updates that you receive for specific activity that you are subscribed to.
Subscription options
You can choose to subscribe to notifications for:
- A conversation in a specific issue, pull request, or gist
- All activity in a repository
- CI activity, such as the status of workflows in repositories set up with GitHub Actions
- Repository issues, pull requests, releases, security alerts, or discussions (if enabled)
You can also choose to automatically watch all repositories that you have push access to, except forks. You can watch any other repository you have access to manually by clicking Watch.
If you're no longer interested in a conversation, you can unsubscribe, unwatch, or customize the types of notifications you'll receive in the future. For example, if you no longer want to receive notifications from a particular repository, you can click Unsubscribe. For more information, see Managing your subscriptions.
Default subscriptions
In general, you are automatically subscribed to conversations by default when you have:
- Not disabled automatic watching for repositories or teams you've joined in your notification settings. This setting is enabled by default.
- Been assigned to an issue or pull request.
- Opened a pull request or issue.
- Commented on a thread.
- Subscribed to a thread manually by clicking Watch or Subscribe.
- Had your username @mentioned.
- Changed the state of a thread, such as by closing an issue or merging a pull request.
- Had a team you're a member of @mentioned.
By default, you also automatically watch all repositories that you create and are owned by your personal account.
To unsubscribe from conversations you're automatically subscribed to, you can change your notification settings or directly unsubscribe or unwatch activity on GitHub. For more information, see Managing your subscriptions.
Customizing notifications and subscriptions
You can choose to view your notifications through the notifications inbox at https://github.com/notifications and in the GitHub Mobile app, through your email, or some combination of these options.
To customize the types of updates you'd like to receive and where to send those updates, configure your notification settings. For more information, see Configuring notifications.
To keep your subscriptions manageable, review your subscriptions and watched repositories and unsubscribe as needed. For more information, see Managing subscriptions for activity on GitHub.
To customize how you'd like to receive updates for specific pull requests or issues, you can configure your preferences within the issue or pull request. For more information, see Triaging a single notification.
You can customize and schedule push notifications in the GitHub Mobile app. For more information, see Configuring notifications.
Reasons for receiving notifications
Your inbox is configured with default filters, which represent the most common reasons that people need to follow-up on their notifications. For more information about inbox filters, see Managing notifications from your inbox.
Your inbox shows the reason you're receiving a notification as a label, such as, mention, subscribed, or review requested.
You can filter your inbox by the reason you're subscribed to notifications. For example, to only see pull requests where someone requested your review, you can use the reason:review-requested query filter.
If you've configured notifications to be sent by email and believe you're receiving notifications that don't belong to you, consider troubleshooting with email headers, which show the intended recipient. For more information, see Configuring notifications.
Triaging notifications from your inbox
To effectively manage your notifications, you can triage your inbox with options to:
- Remove a notification from the inbox with Done. You can review Done notifications all in one place by clicking Done in the sidebar or by using the query
is:done. - Mark a notification as read or unread.
- Save a notification for later review. Saved notifications are flagged in your inbox. You can review Saved notifications all in one place in the sidebar by clicking Saved or by using the query
is:saved. - Automatically unsubscribe from this notification and future updates from this conversation. Unsubscribing also removes the notification from your inbox. If you unsubscribe from a conversation and someone mentions your username or a team you're on that you're receiving updates for, then you will start to receive notifications from this conversation again.
From your inbox you can also triage multiple notifications at once. For more information, see Managing notifications from your inbox.
Customizing your notifications inbox
To focus on a group of notifications in your inbox, you can create custom filters. For example, you can create a custom filter for an open source project you contribute to and only see notifications for that repository in which you are mentioned. For more information, see Managing notifications from your inbox. For more examples of how to customize your triaging workflow, see Customizing a workflow for triaging your notifications.
Notification retention policy
Notifications that are not marked as Saved are kept for 5 months. Notifications marked as Saved are kept indefinitely. If your saved notification is older than 5 months and you unsave it, the notification will disappear from your inbox within a day.
Feedback and support
If you have feedback or feature requests for notifications, use a GitHub Community discussion.