Separate Notifications for Teams and Direct Mentions

[gkotas]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Profile

Body

My company recently made use of teams in Github. We use these for code owners for different subdirectories. The issue I am having is now my general team (Team A) is added to every PR in that directory . I only care about PRs for my smaller subteam (Team A1) but I am not getting notifications for all PRs (TeamA2 and TeamA3).

CompanyRepo/
├── teamA/
│   ├── subteamA1/
│   ├── subteamA2/
│   └── subteamA3/
├── teamB/
│   ├── subteamB1/
│   └── subteamB2/
└── teamC/
    ├── subteamC1/
    └── subteamC2/

My request is can I disable email notifications for PRs I get included on via the team while keeping notifications for PRs I am explicitly mentioned on?

I know I can differentiate between these two when I search for issues using review-requested:@me and user-review-requested:@me. This first showing all PRs with my team and the second only showing PRs with me explicitly added to it.

[gkotas]

Ill try using the github notifications for now. Im just used to my email notifications and am stuck in my ways.

[gkotas]

The frustrating part is that notification preferences don't seem to expose that same level of granularity.

This was my frustration too.

When these PRs are opened, are you receiving notifications because:

• You are a member of Team A?
• Or because Team A is a parent team of Team A1?

Originally the issue was every person in the company was in the broad team groups which allowed anyone to merge code to any subteam directory. This was fixed by adding the subteams and reducing the broad Team A group to just a select few people with merge rights. I am one of these few. I can merge code to any subteam if need be but I dont need the email notification for every PR, only the ones I am tagged explicitly on.

[Ayushgupta2408]

As far as I know, GitHub currently does not provide a notification setting that allows you to disable notifications triggered by team review requests while still receiving notifications only when you are individually requested or directly mentioned.

A few possible workarounds are:

Use user-review-requested:@me to track PRs where you are explicitly requested as a reviewer.
Create email filters based on GitHub notification headers or subject patterns to separate team-review notifications from direct requests.
Adjust repository watch settings if the volume of notifications is high.
Consider asking your organization administrators whether CODEOWNERS entries can be made more granular so that only the relevant subteam is requested for reviews.

A dedicated notification preference that distinguishes between team-based review requests and individual review requests would be a useful enhancement, especially for organizations with large team hierarchies and CODEOWNERS-based review workflows.