Notifications and email preferences

Ambital notifies you two ways: the bell in the topbar (in-app) and email, and you control each separately. The design goal is a bell you trust — it lights up when something needs you, not for everything that moved.

The bell and the Notifications page

A notification is something that happened — or something you asked to be reminded of. Nothing appears just because a due date has passed or is coming up: deadlines live on your dashboard and in the weekly digest, so the bell stays quiet until there is genuine news.

The bell shows how many notifications you haven't read. It turns red when a connection has broken (an integration that lost its sign-in), because nobody else will notice that for you.

The Notifications page opens on everything unread, with tabs to narrow it down:

• Mentions & comments — someone tagged you, or commented on a task, status update or approval of yours.
• Messages — unread direct messages, channels and project-thread posts.
• Approvals & decisions — an approval waiting on you; yours approved, declined or sent back; a decision waiting on you or recorded on your project; a change request raised by a client or answered.
• Tasks — a task assigned to you, its dates or status moved by someone else, or a task you're watching completed.
• Status updates — an update sent to a project you're on, or a scheduled draft ready for your review.
• Emails — optional. Switch it on under Settings → Notifications to add a tab of project email addressed to you that nobody on your side has answered in two working days. Off by default.
• Personal — your personal task reminders (once, on the day) and notes captured into your inbox.
• Connections — a sync or integration that has stopped working.

Reading works the way you'd expect:

• Opening a notification marks it read. The tick on the row marks it read without opening it. Mark all read clears the lot.
• Read stays read until something else happens to that item — a new comment on a thread you've cleared brings it back as new.
• A broken connection snoozes for a week rather than disappearing for good, so an outage nobody fixed comes back.
• Tick Show read to look back over what you've cleared, and use the undo arrow to put one back.
• Task notifications open the task right there in a detail panel — no losing your place.

Email preferences

Everyone sets their own under Settings → Notifications:

• Per-category toggles — choose which kinds of activity may email you at all.
• Digest cadence — a summary email daily, weekly, or off, instead of (or as well as) item-by-item mail.

Two useful patterns: inbox-minimalists switch categories off and keep a weekly digest; the always-on crowd keep task emails and skip the digest.

The same page also holds the meeting reminder pop-up — an in-app card shortly before each meeting starts, with the join link one click away. Pick how much warning you want (5–30 minutes, default 10) or turn it off. No email is involved, so the master email switch doesn't affect it.

What you can't turn off

Transactional email — invites, password resets, support-ticket replies — always arrives, regardless of preferences. Those aren't notifications; they're the plumbing of your account.

Tip: if the bell shows red and you haven't touched anything, check Settings → Integrations first — a connection needing re-authorisation is the most common cause, and reconnecting clears it. See Sync and connection problems.